Botanical garden: Encyclopedia - Botanical garden

Botanical garden

Botanical gardens (in Latin, hortus botanicus) grow a wide variety of plants primarily categorized and documented for scientific purposes, but also for the enjoyment and education of visitors, a consideration that has become essential to secure public funding. Two less well-known but equally important elements in every botanical garden are its library and its herbarium of dried and documented plant material; and a further expectation is that these as well as the garden itself are staffed by professionals. Not all botanical gardens, however, have been open to the general public: see, for example, the Chelsea Physic Garden.

Botanical garden - Research

From the late 18th century onward, European botanical gardens began sending plant-collecting expeditions and publishing flora collected from various parts of the world. Subsequent scientific work studied how these exotic plants might be adapted to grow in the garden's locale, how to classify them and how to propagate rare or endangered species. The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, near London, has been publishing journals and more recently catalogues and databases since this time.

Botanical garden - Educational work

Educational projects at botanical gardens range from introductions to plants that thrive in different environments to practical advice for the home gardener. Many have plant shops, selling flower, herb and vegetable seedlings suitable for transplantation. Some gardens such as the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research and the Chicago Botanical Garden have plant breeding programs and introduce new plants to the horticultural trade.

Inside the United States Botanic Garden

Inside Kew Gardens Palm House

A botanical garden of Kitchener's Island, Aswan

Botanical garden - History

The first modern botanical gardens were founded in Northern Italy in connection with universities:

• Pisa (1543) by Luca Ghini (1490-1556)
• Padua (1545)
• Bologna (1567)

Other European towns then followed suit:

• Leiden, Netherlands (1590)
• Montpellier, France (1593)
• Heidelberg, Germany (1597)
• Tübingen, Germany by Leonhart Fuchs
• Copenhagen, Denmark (1600)
• Uppsala, Sweden (1655)
• Hannover, Germany (1666)

See also

List of botanical gardens

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Botanical garden", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki