The influence of scientific theories on the design of botanical gardens around 1800

Abstract

There are few persons, when enjoying the recreation of a walk in the garden, or shrubbery, but who are desirous of possessing some knowledge of the beautiful objects which surround them.¹

Around 1800, botanical gardens were the scene of numerous meetings between educated botanists, scholars and amateurs captivated by the amazing picture of the plant kingdom and of its diversity and its mise-en-scène offered behind the fences of these scientific institutions. Since the Renaissance, botanical gardens had become public places where botanists themselves wondered among other things about the morphological diversity of plants. Places where they studied plant affinities and tried, for example, to solve the secrets of plant sexuality. Botanical gardens were open laboratories where scientists used to test their knowledge and, particularly in the field of plant systematics, their discernment of orders and harmonies within nature. In concluding his outstanding study on the identity of botanical gardens within the dynamics and the construction of biological knowledge Staffan Müller-Wille wrote:

Botanical Gardens and comparable institutions like large museums were, as I have tried to show, not those passive containers, merely absorbing the discursive formation of classical natural history, but rather the driving forces of a constant circulation of signs and things, in which no representation was ultimate but each referred to a previous one.²