The Missouri Botanical Garden opened to the public in 1859 and began to grow in the European tradition of horticultural display combined with education and the search for new knowledge. The layout of the botanical garden must balance an aesthetic presentation for educational purposes and spaces open to visitors, but useful for botanists and conservationists, although most botanical field research is carried out in environments other than public botanical gardens.
botanical gardens
usually host hybridization experiments and the development of new plant species (cultivars). In the 18th century, it became fashionable to build gardens according to the Carl Linnaeus classification system, which facilitated comparisons within plant families.In addition, the distinctions between more rustic English gardens and more geometric and orderly French gardens have also influenced American designers of botanical gardens. In addition, American gardens that feature species from around the world often group them by origin, sometimes designing each section to resemble the native area. Alternatively, plants are sometimes grouped according to the geological features in which they are found. However, American botanical gardens, especially those further north, must take into account seasonal changes when planning their design, and sometimes close during the winter.
European botanical gardens originated in the Renaissance during the 16th century. During the Middle Ages, botanical research was largely hampered by the inability of manuscripts to accurately represent plants, since each copy was made anew. The invention of the printing press in the 1450s, combined with the recovery of ancient botanical texts, allowed the study of botany to flourish in the late 15th and 16th centuries. Luca Ghini is believed to have created the first botanical garden in Pisa in 1543, but these gardens quickly spread throughout Italy and beyond Europe, often connected to medical schools and focusing on medicinal herbs.
The first medicinal gardens in the United States were inspired by these, the most famous and perhaps the first, a garden founded in 1694 outside Philadelphia by German pietists. Although other ephemeral attempts were made in the 19th century to establish botanical gardens, it wasn't until 1859 that another public and non-governmental (and the oldest) botanical garden was successfully opened in the United States. The Missouri Botanical Garden, which was created in 1859 by Henry Shaw, an English merchant motivated to create a garden on his land in St. Louis on a trip to London in 1851, which included a visit to the famous Royal Botanic Garden in Kew.
The Missouri Botanical Garden, which operates into the 21st century, is home to the Center for Plant Conservation, a coalition of more than thirty botanical gardens across the country that seeks to preserve endangered Native American plants. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a marked increase in the number of public botanical gardens, many of them affiliated with universities or other research centers. Some were bequeathed to the public by devoted fans. The botanical gardens started during this period include the Arnold Arboretum (187), the New York Botanical Garden (189), the Smith College Botanical Garden (1893-89), the Brooklyn Botanical Garden (191), the Huntington Botanical Garden (191), the Longwood Gardens (192) and the University of California.
Berkeley Botanical Garden (19.2) The Arnold Arboretum is affiliated with Harvard University, which had created the much smaller Harvard Botanical Garden, relative to the botanical research facilities in 1805, but the Arboretum estate was bequeathed by James Arnold for an outdoor collection of woody premises and plants (ex. The Arboretum consists of 265 acres in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. It was created by Frederick Law Olmsted and its first director, Charles Sprague Sargent. Although heavily damaged by a 1938 hurricane, it remains one of the most outstanding American gardens, known for its scientific research, plant development, extensive herbarium and East Asian collections.
Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania offer 1,050 acres dedicated primarily to exhibition and education, although there is also a research center. Before the gardens were founded, the estate known as Peirce Farm had a remarkable collection of trees, which Pierre du Pont bought. At the beginning of the 20th century, he began to turn it into a public garden known for its beauty and extravagance. It was largely based on Italian and French models, but included exhibition gardens that showcased species from around the world.
The Botanical Garden at the University of California at Berkeley was originally established in 1890 as a garden specializing in native species. After being moved to a different campus in 1928, the collection began to expand to include exotic species. Although the garden is only thirty-four acres, the collection is known for the diversity and depth of its properties. Also noteworthy is the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona, one of the largest desert gardens in the world.
Founded in 1937, the Southwest climate allows the garden to cultivate and display in a natural environment plants that could not survive anywhere else in the United States. Towards the end of the 19th century, classifications and botanical research focused on physiology rather than morphology. This increased the amount of scientific equipment needed for a botanical garden and encouraged a move away from Linnaean exhibits. The suburbanization of the American landscape in the 20th century has threatened the prominent and viability of public botanical gardens, especially those in cities.
The urban renewal projects of the 1970s and 1980s, when combined with economic growth, perhaps resulted in an urban revival of the 1990s, in which botanical gardens flourished again. While botanical gardens continue to be important for recreation and education, the most important trend in botanical gardens around the world during the 20th century has been the growing awareness of their potential to aid conservation efforts. Industrialization, pollution, urbanization, suburbanization, the destruction of tropical forests, climate change and the spread of invasive species as a result of globalization are currently threatening biodiversity, as plant species become extinct every day. Botanical gardens can offer ex situ conservation of species that are being expelled from their original habitats.
The first attempt to involve botanical gardens around the world in coordinated conservation efforts was made in 1987 with the founding of the Secretariat for the Conservation of Botanical Gardens. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Plant Conservation Center houses 580 rare species of Native Americans. However, according to their statistics, 730 of the 20,000 native American plant species are now officially endangered, while some 4,000 are considered threatened. It seems that conservation has become the most important research function of botanical gardens today.
There are many botanical gardens in the United States, most of which were created to provide a natural environment for people to enjoy and a laboratory for scholars to study plant diversity. They generally contain several botanical species along with libraries, herbaria, museums, and educational and research facilities. Botanical gardens, which are traditionally distinguished by the use of some type of classification system, use the science of taxonomy to organize and compare the plants and herbal material collected by them. This practice has allowed botanical gardens to serve as acclimation stations through which plants native to one part of the world can be established and presented to the public in other parts of the world.
Recent developments, such as the emphasis on horticulture and the inclusion of greenhouses and conservatories, have expanded the scientific and recreational appeal of botanical gardens across the country. Although there are records of a botanical garden in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as early as 1672, the Missouri Botanical Garden, founded in 1859, was the first in the United States to follow the European model that was developed in the 17th and 18th centuries. The founding took place exactly when the parks movement began in the United States; botanical gardens were soon established in New York and Philadelphia in 1891, and in Brooklyn in 1910, in concert with parks designed by men like Frederick Law, Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. Most of these new American botanical gardens combined scientific efforts with a more civic purpose that encouraged public use and enjoyment of the gardens.
They also tended to have a horticultural emphasis rather than purely scientific, and involved the collection and maintenance of several plants and the exchange of seeds with other botanical gardens around the world, using the global Index Seminum system. During the 20th century, several private botanical gardens were created that did not conform to the dominant international tradition. These gardens are often not involved in seed exchange or other global networks, and prefer to focus on educational and recreational programs with strong support from their local community. Others The Missouri and New York Botanical Gardens are among the oldest and most internationally acclaimed of the more than 100 botanical gardens listed in the United States.
Also worth mentioning are several other botanical gardens that specialize in particular areas. The Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, landscaped between 1872 and 1898 on 101 hectares (250 acres) of land outside Boston, focuses on trees and shrubs with a current collection of approximately 6200 tree species.
Brooklyn's smaller Botanical
Garden (19) and the Strybing Arboretum in San Francisco (193) emphasize the educational purpose of their diverse collections. The Huntington Garden in San Marino, Los Angeles (190), is famous for its unusual combination of ornamental and desert gardens, while the Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami (193) is an important collection of tropical species.National Arboretum, established on 415 acres (168 hectares) of land in Washington, DC, DC. These represent a small selection of the botanical gardens that have flourished in the United States throughout the 20th century. A botanical garden is a place where plant collections are cultivated, managed and maintained. Plants are often labeled and available for scientific study by students and for public observation.
An arboretum is a garden composed primarily of trees, vines, and shrubs. Gardens usually keep collections of seeds stored in special facilities called seed banks. Many gardens maintain special collections of preserved plants, known as herbariums, which are used to identify and classify unknown plants. Laboratories for the scientific study of plants and classrooms are also common.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, gardens evolved from traditional herbal collections to facilities with broader interests. Some gardens, in particular the Royal Botanic Garden of Kew, near London, played an important role in spreading the cultivation of commercially important plants, such as coffee (Coffea arabica), rubber (Hevea spp. Other gardens focusing on new varieties of horticultural plants. The Leiden garden in the Netherlands, for example, was instrumental in stimulating the development of the extensive global trade in Dutch bulbs.
Many other gardens have played an important place in the scientific study of plant diversity, as well as in the introduction and evaluation of plants for agriculture, horticulture, forestry and medicine. See also Conservation; Critical Habitat; Ecosystem; Endangered Species; Forest Deterioration; Organic Gardening and Agriculture Botanical gardens and arboretums are living museums. Its collections are plants and, like any museum specimen, they are carefully identified, accessed, labeled and exhibited for public enjoyment and education. They offer a great opportunity for both professional and interested audiences to learn more about the diverse world of plants, how to cultivate them and the benefits they offer to society.
Botanical gardens and arboretums can be based on a design that brings together trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants in their respective taxonomic groups. Or, they can be grouped according to the region of the world where the plant grows in its native environment. Often, plants are used to create small landscaped display gardens, such as a rhododendron garden, wildflowers, medicinal or Japanese-style flowers, or examples of gardens for the home landscape. In addition to their outdoor gardens and plant collections, botanical gardens and arboretums may include herbaria for the collection and conservation of dry plant specimens, libraries, research laboratories, production and exhibition greenhouses, conservatories for indoor display of tropical plants, educational classrooms, areas for interpretive exhibitions and public services, such as a gift shop or restaurant.
These diverse resources and facilities require a qualified staff of workers. The most important consideration in maintaining botanical gardens and arboretums are good plant care practices. Horticulturists, trained in these practices, spend time on everything from lawn maintenance to systematic pruning of tree and shrub collections. Horticulturists are also responsible for harvesting new plants, propagating seeds and cuttings, and keeping accurate records of growth and health characteristics.
Other types of professional staff depend on the goals of the individual garden. They may include a phytopathologist or plant disease specialist, a landscape architect, research scientists, educators, librarians, and a membership and fundraising specialist. A director is responsible for coordinating the entire botanical garden program. Botanical gardens and arboretums can be established independently, be part of a government agency, or connected to a college or university.
Funds to support their activities can be obtained through memberships, dues, fiscal support or endowment funds, or a combination of these methods. See also: Curator of a Botanical Garden; Taxonomy. What can be called the roots of the botanical garden as an institution dates back to ancient China and to many of the countries that border the Mediterranean. In fact, they were often centers for growing fruit trees, vegetables and herbs that were used for food and for manufacturing the raw medicines of the time.
After the discovery of the printing press, manuscripts on plants, which had existed for centuries, became more widely disseminated, stimulating the publication of descriptive works called herbs. Herbalists and their herbalists, in turn, encouraged the founding of botanical gardens. At the end of the 16th century there were five such gardens in Europe and, by the middle of the 20th century, several hundred. The first two were in Italy, in Pisa (154) and in Padua (154).
Initially, these gardens were associated with university medical schools. The medical teachers were mainly the botanists of the time, and their “physical gardens” were used both for training students and for growing plants to make medicines. But they also served in other ways. Carolus Clusius, a prominent 16th century botanist, for example, assembled an extensive collection of flowering bulbs in the Leiden Botanical Garden (The Netherlands), which turned out to be the beginning of the Dutch bulb industry.
The Botanical Garden (Orto Botanico) of the University of Padua, Italy, is considered to be the oldest Horto Medicinal University in the world and is still in its original environment. The garden was founded by the Republic of Venice in 1545 to comply with an urgent request from the medical school of the University of Padua. Four hundred and sixty years later, the garden is still a teaching garden for pharmacy and botany students. The curators, through an Index seminum, are in contact with 800 botanical gardens on five continents.
Medicinal plants continue to be an important part of the 6000 plants in the garden, which also include historic, aquatic and poisonous plants, rare trees and orchids. The physical gardens, developed by medical professors who were the botanists of this period, served as a teaching resource and a source of plants to produce medicines. In the United States, there is the American Public Garden Association (formerly the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboretums), and in Australasia there are the Australian and New Zealand Botanical Gardens (BGANZ). Many of the functions of botanical gardens have already been discussed in the previous sections, which emphasize the scientific basis of botanical gardens with their focus on research, education and conservation.
Nowadays, botanical gardens and arboretums are mainly dedicated to the cultivation of plants and the exhibition of ornamental plants and groups of plants of special interest. In England, the Chelsea Physical Garden was founded in 1673 as the Apothecary Society Garden. Colonial powers often used botanical gardens to cultivate exotic spices and products, but due to the relatively cold climate of the colonial United States, gardens designed for foreign trade were never as common as in India, Malaysia or the West Indies. These gardens stand out for their structures that include sculptures, pavilions, music kiosks, memorials, shade houses, tea houses and the like.
The five-acre garden featured native and exotic plants, and Bartram traveled the United States in search of worthy additions, some of which he sent to European gardens. It is not simply a landscaped or ornamental garden, although it may be artistic, nor is it an experiment station or a park with labels on plants. . .
