Collections and knowledge: constancy and flux in a sixteenth-century botanic garden

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Agnes Robertson Arber, Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution, a Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470–1670, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 1.

2. Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, translated by Arthur F. Hort, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1916).

3. Theophrastus, De causis plantarum: in Three Volumes, translated by Benedict Einarson and George K. K. Link, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976–1990).

4. Edward Lee Greene, Landmarks of Botanical History, Part 2, edited by Frank N. Egerton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 128.

5. Karen Meier Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities (New York: Garland, 1991), p. 7.

6. Greene, op. cit., 1983, pp. 131–132.

7. John Brodie McDiarmid, ‘Theophrastus’, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 13/2, 1976, p. 333.

8. Costas A. Thanos, ‘The Geography of Theophrastus’ Life and of His Botanical Writings in the Aegean’, in Andreas J. Karamanos and C. A. Thanos (eds) Biodiversity and Natural Heritage in the Aegean, Proceedings of the Conference ‘Theophrastus 2000’ (Athens: Frangoudis, 2000), p. 117.

9. Botanic Gardens Conservation International ‘Definition of a botanic garden’, http://www.bgci.org/resources/1528/, viewed 24 November 2015.

10. Stephen Forbes, ‘Enquiry into Plants: Nature, Utopia and Botanic Gardens’, in Annette Giesecke and Naomi Jacobs (eds), Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia and the Garden (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012), pp. 220–241.

11. Plato Cratylus 402A - see translation in Daniel W. Graham, The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 159.

12. Daniel W. Graham, ‘Heraclitus’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 edn), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/heraclitus/, viewed 24 November 2015.

13. Daniel W. Graham, op. cit., 2015.

14. Alain Touwaide, ‘Botany and Humanism in the Renaissance: Background, Interaction, Contradictions’, Studies in the History of Art, 69, 2014, pp. 32–61.

15. Arthur W. Hill, ‘The History and Functions of Botanic Gardens’, Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 2, 1915, pp. 185–240.

16. The Horto at Padua was established at a time when ‘magic and … erudition [citations of ancient authorities]’ were ‘on a par with what we can recognize as scientific rationality’ (Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 143). In this context interpretations of what motivated the establishment of Early Modern botanic gardens vary widely. John Prest and Richard Drayton see their establishment as the ‘Gathering in of Creation’ evolving from Christian neoplatonism, Richard Palmer focuses on an alliance with the evolution of medical science and medical teaching, while Andrea Ubrizsy Savoia and Brian Ogilvie see currents in the evolution of natural history as critical (John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 346; Richard Palmer, ‘Medical Botany in Northern Italy in the Renaissance’ Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 78, 1985, pp. 149–157; Andrea Ubrizsy Savoia, ‘The Influence of New World Species on the Botany of the 16th Century’, Asclepio, 48, 1996, pp. 163–172; Brian W. Ogilvie, ‘Encyclopaedism in Renaissance Botany: From Historia to Pinax’, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 1997, lxxix, pp. 89–99). Karen Reeds views the legitimization of botany within Early Modern humanism as the catalyst and dependent on the recovery, editing, translation and printing of the four botanical authorities of antiquity — Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen (Karen Meier Reeds, ‘Renaissance Humanism and Botany’, Annals of Science, 33, 1976, p. 520). She argues that access to these authorities, together with humanist enthusiasms for classical learning, art and educational reform, gave the study of plants a new character and a new appeal. Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi and Else Terwen-Dionisius interpret arcane elements of the original design of the Horto to explore the relationship between design, purpose and function (Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘The Origins, Function and Role of the Botanical Garden in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Italy’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 25, 2005, pp. 103–115; Else M. Terwen-Dionisius, ‘Date and Design of the Botanical Garden in Padua’, The Journal of Garden History, 14, 1994, pp. 213–235). Although John Prest’s ‘The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-creation of Paradise’ remains the most significant study of the origins of botanic gardens in the Early Modern period, his focus is on the commentary of observers of Renaissance botanic gardens, perhaps at the expense of any analysis of the values, objectives and achievements of their sponsoring university faculties and lecturers, the botanic garden curators and the botanists themselves. A clearer reconciliation of the motives for the origin of Renaissance botanic gardens and of their achievements remains desirable. Michel Foucault’s ‘The Order of Things’ provides a useful epistemological framework for such an analysis. He describes a radical shift in the conception of order, signs and language in the Early Modern period and defines the Renaissance and Classical epistemes on the basis of this transformation in the conception of knowledge (Gutting, op. cit., 1989, p. 140). He even observes ‘an epistemological preference enjoyed by botany [as] the area common to words and things constituted a much more accommodating, a much less “black” grid for plants than animals’ (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 149). The institutional arrangement of Renaissance botanic gardens are interpreted as ‘the inevitable correlatives of this patterning’, a new method for defining and transmitting plant knowledge, and perhaps — as he implies — as a fundamental change in the nature of our relationship with plants in time and in space (Foucault, op. cit., 2002, p. 150).

17. Contemporary botanists estimate the number of flowering plant species in the order of 300000 — a number an order of magnitude greater than even the largest botanic garden collections today (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, ‘Conservation and Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew’, Fact Sheet 2010, http://www.kew.org/press/factsheets/Conservation%20and%20Science%20at%20RBG%20Kew.pdf, viewed 24 November 2015). Germinal Rouhan and Myriam Gaudeul provide a broad historical context for plant taxonomy and the elucidation of species and André Cailleux illustrates logarithmic growth in the elucidation of plant species globally from 1500 (Germinal Rouhan and Myriam Gaudeul, ‘Plant Taxonomy: A Historical Perspective, Current Challenges, and Perspectives’, in Pascale Besse (ed.), Molecular Plant Taxonomy: Methods and Protocols, Methods in Molecular Biology (Clifton, NJ: Elsevier, 2014), 1115, pp. 1–37; André Cailleux, ‘Progression Du Nombre D’espèces de Plantes Décrites de 1500 À Nos Jours’, Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications, 6, 1953, pp. 42–49).

18. Frans Stafleu, ‘Botanical Gardens before 1818’, Boissiera, 14, 1969, pp. 31–46.

19. Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden: From the Conventions of Planning, Design and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Central Italy, Garden History (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1990).

20. Robin Arthur Donkin, ‘Spanish Red: An Ethnogeographical Study of Cochineal and the Opuntia Cactus’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 67, 1977, pp. 1–84.

21. Contrast Frans Stafleu’s suggestion of an origin in Europe for Capsicum via the East Indies (Stafleu, op. cit., 1969 p. 35) with John Bohan’s contention that while a direct introduction to Europe from America by the Spanish is most likely, there may have been secondary introductions to Europe from Asia (John Bohan, The Occurrence of Chili Peppers (Capsicum spp.) in the Diets of the Old World, MA dissertation (Missoula: University of Montana, 1986), p. 36). Marie Christine Daunay, Henri Laterrot and Jules Janick stress the diversity of Capsicum species and cultivars which may allow for both theories (Marie Christine Daunay, Henri Laterrot and Jules Janick, ‘Iconography of the Solanaceae from Antiquity to the XVIIth Century: A Rich Source of Information on Genetic Diversity and Uses’, Acta Horticulturae, 745, 2007, pp. 59–88).

22. Elsa M. Cappelletti, ‘Plants Cultivated at the Time of Anguillara’ in Alessandro Minelli (ed.) The Botanical Garden of Padua 1545–1995 (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), p. 163.

23. Cappelletti, op. cit., 1995, p. 163.

24. Andrea Ubrizsy Savoia, ‘The Botanical Garden of Padua in Guilandino’s Day’, in Alessandro Minelli (ed.), The Botanical Garden of Padua 1545–1995 (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), p. 175.

25. Johann G. Schenck, Hortus Patavinus; cui accessere Melchioris Guilandini conjectanea synonymica plantarum (Frankfurt: Mathaeus Becker, Johann Theodo and Johann Israel De Bry, 1608).

26. Schenck, op. cit., 1608; Ubrizsy Savoia, op. cit., 1995, p. 176.

27. Elsa M. Cappelletti, ‘Living Collections in the Botanical Gardens at the Time of Cortuso (1591)’, in Alessandro Minelli (ed.) The Botanical Garden of Padua 1545–1995 (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), p. 197; Girolamo Porro, L’horto de i semplici di Padova … (Venice: Porro, 1591).

28. Schenck, op. cit., 1608.

29. Foucault, op. cit., 2002, p. 147.

30. Reeds, op. cit., 1976, pp. 520–521.

31. Desiderius Erasmus, The Collected Works of Erasmus: The Correspondence of Erasmus Volume 3, edited by Richard J. Schoeck and Beatrice Corrigan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), p. 70.

32. Reeds, op. cit., 1976, p. 521.

33. Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 58/3, 1997, p. 412.

34. Reeds, op. cit., 1976, p. 539.

35. Arber, op. cit., 1953, p. 12.

36. Dennis E. Rhodes, ‘The Botanical Garden of Padua: The First Hundred Years’, The Journal of Garden History, 4/4, 1984, p. 327.

37. Vittorio Dal Piaz and Maurizio Rippa Bonati, ‘The Design and Form of the Padua Horto Medicinale’, in Alessandro Minelli (ed.), The Botanical Garden of Padua 1545–1995 (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), p. 33.

38. Università di Padova Decreto di Fondazione dell’Orto dei simplici (Padua, Archivo Antico Università di Padova illuminated copy), v 666 ff. 14r–15r.

39. Michel Foucault observes, ‘To us, it seems that sixteenth-century learning was made up of an unstable mixture of rational knowledge, notions derived from magical practices, and a whole cultural heritage whose power and authority had been vastly increased by the rediscovery of Greek and Roman authors’ (Foucault, op. cit., 2002, pp. 35–36). As an exemplar he illustrates the application of signs in Renaissance medicine as in, for example, the Doctrine of Signatures. He quotes Oswald Crollius’s 1612 Traité des Signatures: ‘It is useless to go no further than the skin or bark of plants if you wish to know their nature, you must go straight to their marks … to the shadow and image of God that they bear or to their internal virtue, which has been given to them by heaven as a natural dowry … a virtue, I say, that is to be recognized rather by its signature’. (Foucault, op. cit., 2002, pp. 30–31). His illustration from Crollius is apposite: ‘This sign (of a sympathy between aconite and our eyes) is easily legible in its seeds; they are tiny dark globes set in white skinlike coverings whose appearance is much like that of eyelids covering an eye.’ In stark contrast, while acknowledging the doctrine of signatures as part of the medical lexicon, Agnes Arber considers that, ‘ … there is comparatively little reference to such matters in the works of the genuine herbalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ (Arber, op. cit., 1953, p. 247). She observes the succession of contemporary works dealing with the ‘signatures’ of plants and botanical astrology but concurs with herbalist Rembertus Dodoens’ 1583 observation that, ‘ … the doctrine of Signatures of Plants has received the authority of no ancient writer who is held in any esteem: moreover it is so changeable and uncertain that, as far as science or learning is concerned, it seems absolutely unworthy of acceptance’ (Arber, op. cit., 1953, p. 255). See discussion on the epistemology of Early Modern botanic gardens in footnote 16.

40. Cappelletti, op. cit., 1995, p. 165.

41. Decreto di Fondazione dell’Orto dei semplici. Archivo Antico Univerità di Padova, Illuminated copy, Vol. 666 ff 14r–15r. Paula Findlen, ‘Anatomy Theaters, Botanical Gardens, and Natural History Collections’, in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds), The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 3 Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 280.

42. Roy Palmer, ‘Medical Botany in Northern Italy in the Renaissance’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 78/2, 1985, pp. 151, 155.

43. Palmer, op. cit., 1985, p. 151.

44. Palmer, op. cit., 1985, p. 154.

45. Paula Findlen, ‘Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 7.

46. Palmer, op. cit., 1985, p. 153.

47. Reeds, op. cit., 1976, p. 528.

48. John Scarborough and Vivian Nutton, ‘The Preface of Dioscorides’ Materia Medica: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary’, Transactions & studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 4/3, 1982, pp. 196–197.

49. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, Translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: Taylor & Francis, 1855), 26.6, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D26%3Achapter%3D6, viewed 24 November 2015.

50. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, 25.4, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D25%3Achapter%3D4#note1, viewed 24 November 2015.

51. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, 25.5, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D25%3Achapter%3D5, viewed 24 November 2015.

52. Findlen, op. cit., 1996, p. 165.

53. William T. Stearn, ‘Sources of Information About Botanic Gardens and Herbaria’, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 3/3, 1971, p. 225.

54. Stearn, op. cit., 1971, p. 226.

55. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases (London: John van Voorst, 1852), p. 132.

56. Benedict Einarson ‘Introduction’, in Theophrastus, De Causis Plantarum, Vol. 1, translated and edited by Benedict Einarson and George K. K. Link, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. xi.

57. Therese O’Malley, ‘Art and Science in the Design of Botanic Gardens, 1730–1830’, in John Dixon Hunt (ed.), Garden History: Issues, Approaches, Methods (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1992), p. 279.

58. Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature & Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 122.

59. ‘Tu, con arte, che’l mondo uni caammira’ from the first dedicatory poem to Giacomo Antonio Cortuso in Girolamo Porro, L’Horto de i semplici di Padova (Venice: Girolamo Porro, 1591), s.n.; Prest, op. cit., 1988, p. 110.

60. Findlen, op. cit., 2006, p. 288.

61. Findlen, op. cit., 2006, p. 288.

62. Terwen-Dionisius, op. cit., 1994, p. 223.

63. Porro, op. cit., 1591, s.n.

64. Foucault, op. cit., 2002, p. 143.

65. Foucault, op. cit., 2002, pp. 142–143.

66. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16/1, 22–27, 1986, p. 26.

67. Findlen, op. cit., 1996, p. 36.

68. Ubrizsy Savoia, op. cit., 1995, p. 180; Catalogue title for final section: ‘Indice di Tutte le Plante, Che si ritrovano il presente Anno 1591 nell’Horto de i Semplici di Padova’, Porro, op. cit., 1591, s.n.

69. Ubrizsy Savoia, op. cit., 1995, p. 179.

70. Foucault, op. cit., 1986, p. 26.

71. David G. Mann, Quentin C. B. Cronk and David A. H. Rae, ‘The River of Diversity: Perspectives on the Use and Management of Living Collections in Botanic Gardens’, http://rbg-web2.rbge.org.uk/algae/publications/Mann_etal_Palermo1995.pdf, viewed 23 June 2014.

72. See Mann, Cronk and Rae, op. cit., 1995, pp. 7–8. Over the two decades from 1928 to 1949 Sir William Wright Smith published a series of 22 papers on the genus Primula. The first of these papers was co-authored with famed botanical collector George Forrest and the others with H. R. Fletcher. While in 1994 Edinburgh still held 841 different accessions of Primula only one accession, collected by Ludlow & Sheriff in Bhutan, remained of the hundreds acquired, primarily in the Sino-Himalayan region, during the first half of the century. The 1994 collection was largely comprised of accessions dating from the 1980s and 1990s. The explanation is straightforward. The living collection of any particular Primula species remains dependent on access to new wild accessions — a problem that applies to the maintenance of conservation collections of the world’s flora. This problem is only now being addressed through the development of global seed banks. The Millennium Seed Bank and the Svalbard Global Seed Bank are both global projects to curate the world’s flora outside of botanic gardens. Here seeds are the living plants collected in a place where time is suspended and interbreeding precluded. Contemporary research and technological innovation allows seeds within these banks to be protected from both the predation and decline in viability that characterized historic seed collections. Whether these projects are able to deliver on their promise remains to be seen. Arthur Cronquist, ‘The Genus Primula. Plant Monograph Reprints, Vol. 11 by W. Wright Smith, G. Forrest and H. R. Fletcher — Review’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 53, 1978, p. 170.

73. Graham, op. cit., 2015.