Botanic Gardens by Sarah Rutherford

Author:Sarah Rutherford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Botanic Gardens
ISBN: 9781784420536
Publisher: Osprey Publishing

Washington DC (1820) was the first major botanic garden in the United States, moving to its present site in 1933.

Missouri Botanical Garden, regarded as the first modern botanic garden in the United States, was founded by an Englishman, Henry Shaw, in the 1850s at the gateway to the American West on the River Mississippi. One of the major early American botanists, George Engelmann, advised Shaw, and, with the Harvard University botanist Asa Gray and Kew’s Sir William Hooker, persuaded him to include a scientific aspect, including a herbarium and library. Founded on broad lines as both a beautiful display garden and a place for learning and the advancement of botanical science, it became one of the world’s leading gardens specialising in tropical plants, a great centre for taxonomy, and is one of the most visited gardens in the United States.

The Arnold Arboretum (founded 1872 and named in honour of a major donor, James Arnold) was designed to display hardy woody plants. Its Picturesque layout was by the most important American landscape architect of his day, Frederick Law Olmsted (designer of Central Park, New York), and remains one of the best preserved of his landscapes. It was founded as a public–private partnership between the City of Boston and Harvard University, ‘for the establishment and support of an arboretum … which shall contain, as far as practicable, all the trees [and] shrubs ... either indigenous or exotic, which can be raised in the open air’. The 280-acre collection became one of the most comprehensive and best documented of its kind, part of a respected research institution with a herbarium collection of over 1.3 million specimens, and a library of forty thousand volumes. The Arboretum’s first director was the botanist Charles Sprague Sargent (1841–1927), who had learned much from Asa Gray. From 1873 Sargent spent fifty-four years shaping it into a distinguished garden and institution, influential worldwide, with an emphasis on the woody species of North America and eastern Asia. He arranged the plant collections by family and genus so that ‘a visitor driving through the Arboretum will be able to obtain a general idea of the arborescent vegetation of the north temperate zone without even leaving his carriage. … Such an arrangement, while avoiding the stiff and formal lines of the conventional botanic garden, will facilitate the comprehensive study of the collections, both in their scientific and picturesque aspects.’ Great collections came from eastern Asia via intrepid plant-hunters, including Sargent himself, Ernest Henry Wilson, William Purdom and Joseph Rock. They introduced many common garden plants, as part of a long and noble tradition of botanical plant-hunters that continues today.

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