The first botanical gardens in Geneva (c. 1750–1830): private initiative leading science

Abstract

Although botany has been practised since Antiquity and the existence of botanical gardens has been developing since the middle of the sixteenth century, it was not until the eighteenth century that botany acquired the status of an autonomous science, with some professional botanists earning their living as professors, garden directors or travelling explorers. The historical and sociological features of the rising ‘Republic of botanists’¹ still remain to be studied in their entirety, because most of the existing researches on botany, as a social phenomenon, have focused either on one type of institution — usually the garden — or on the popularization of knowledge.² These and other studies on the history of botany have shown how that science became independent of its original medical purposes (and from faculties of medicine), how the ‘natural methods’ of classification gradually organized the arrangement of plants in the main gardens, and how public interest in exotic plants increased.

The aim of this paper is to describe the development of botany in a small city, Geneva, which cannot be considered as one of the major centres of research on plants in the eighteenth century, except for the field of plant physiology. Focusing on the genesis of the first private and public gardens, it examines the popularity of botany in the Age of Enlightenment and the kind of demands for knowledge and practical applications that it was supposed to meet and fulfil.