Hortus Botanicus Leiden

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Hortus Botanicus Leiden

The Hortus Botanicus of Leiden

Leiden

Media:Nl-Leiden.ogg is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland in the Netherlands and has 118,000 inhabitants. It forms a single urban area with Oegstgeest, Leiderdorp, Voorschoten, Valkenburg, Rijnsburg and Katwijk, with 254,000 inhabitants....
is the oldest botanical garden

Botanical garden

Botanical gardens grow a wide variety of plants primarily to categorize and document for scientific purposes. Botanists and horticulturalists tend the flora and maintain the garden's library and herbarium of dried and documented plant material....
of the Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a country that is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is a parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy. The Netherlands is located in North-West Europe, and bordered by the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east....
, and one of the oldest in the world. It is located in the southwestern part of the historical centre of the city, between the Academy building and the Leiden Observatory

Leiden Observatory

Leiden Observatory is an astronomy observatory in the city of Leiden in the Netherlands. It was established by Leiden University in 1633, to house the quadrant of Snellius, and is the oldest operating University observatory in the world ....
.

1587 the young University of Leiden requested the burgomasters of Leiden permission to establish a hortus academicus behind the Academy building, for the benefit of the medicine students.

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The Hortus Botanicus of Leiden

Leiden

Botanical garden

Netherlands

Leiden Observatory

History

In 1587 the young University of Leiden requested the burgomasters of Leiden permission to establish a hortus academicus behind the Academy building, for the benefit of the medicine students. Permission was granted in 1590, and as prefect

Prefect

Prefect is a magisterial title of varying definition.A prefect's office, department, or area of control is called a prefecture, but in various post-Roman cases there is a prefect without a prefecture or vice versa....
was appointed the famous botanist Carolus Clusius (1526–1609), who arrived in Leiden in 1593. Clusius' knowledge, reputation and international contacts allowed him to set up a very extensive plant

Plant

Plants are Life organisms belonging to the Kingdom Plantae. They include familiar organisms such as trees, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae....
collection

Collection (museum)

A museum is distinguished by a collection of often unique objects that forms the core of its activities for wikt:exhibitions, education, research, etc....
. Clusius also urged the Dutch East India Company

Dutch East India Company

The Dutch East India Company was a trading company, which was established in 1602, when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly to carry out colonial activities in Asia....
(VOC) to collect plants and (dried) plant specimens. The original garden set up by Clusius was small (about 35 by 40 meters), but contained more than 1000 different plants.

The collecting of tropical (from the Indies

Indies

The Indies or East Indies is a term used, in a wider sense, to describe the lands of South Asia and Southeast Asia, occupying all of the present Indian Union, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and also Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Brunei, Singapore, the Philippines, East Timor, Malaysia and Indonesia....
) and sub-tropical (from the Cape Colony

Cape Colony

The Cape Colony, part of modern South Africa, was established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, with the founding of Cape Town. It was subsequently occupied by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1795 when the Netherlands were occupied by French Revolution, so that the French revolutionaries could not take possession of...
) plants was continued under Clusius' successors. Especially Herman Boerhaave

Herman Boerhaave

Herman Boerhaave was a Netherlands botanist, Humanism and physician of European fame. He is regarded as the founder of clinical teaching and of the modern academic hospital....
(1668-1738, prefect from 1709-1730), contributed greatly to the fame of the Hortus with his efforts to collect new plants and specimens, and with his publications, such as a catalog of the plants then to be found in the Hortus.

Another major contribution to the collections was made by Philipp Franz von Siebold

Philipp Franz von Siebold

Japan

Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, People's Republic of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south....
) by the VOC from 1823 until his expulsion by Japan in 1829. During that period he collected many dried and living plants from all over Japan (as well as animals, ethnographical

Ethnography

Ethnography is a genre of writing that uses fieldwork to provide a descriptive study of human societies. Ethnography presents the results of a holism research method founded on the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other....
objects, maps, etc.), and sent them to Leiden.

The first greenhouse

Greenhouse

A greenhouse is a building where plants are cultivated.A greenhouse is a structure with a glass or plastic roof and frequently glass or plastic walls; it heats up because incoming solar radiation from the sun warms plants, soil, and other things inside the building....
s appeared in the Hortus in the second half of the 17th century, the monumental Orangery

Orangery

An orangery was a building frequently found in the grounds of fashionable residences from the 17th to the 19th century and given a classicising architectural form....
was built between 1740 and 1744. From its original plan the Hortus was progressively expanded until 1817. In 1857, a part was used for building the new Leiden Observatory.

Collection

From a historical perspective, the old Golden Chain

Laburnum

Laburnum is a genus of two species of small trees in the subfamily Faboideae of the pea family Fabaceae, Laburnum anagyroides and Laburnum alpinum ....
(Laburnum anagyroides), planted in 1601, the Tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera) from 1682 and the Ginkgo

Ginkgo

Ginkgo , frequently misspelled as "Gingko", and also known as the Maidenhair Tree after Adiantum, is a unique species of tree with no close living relatives....
(Ginkgo biloba) from 1785 are worth mentioning.

The greenhouses with Victoria amazonica
Victoria amazonica

Victoria amazonica is a species of flowering plant, the largest of the Nymphaeaceae family of water lilies.The species has very large leaves, up to 3 m in diameter, that float on the water's surface on a submerged stalk, 7?8 m in length....
and other tropical plants, and the large collection of sub-tropical plants in the recently renovated Orangery and the new Winter Garden draw many visitors. The park itself is an oasis inside the old city, with many more interesting plants and trees.

A Japanese garden

Japanese garden

, that is, gardens in traditional Japanese style, can be found at private homes, in neighborhood or city parks, and at historical landmarks such as Buddhism temples and old Japanese castles....
in honour of Von Siebold

Philipp Franz von Siebold

Philipp Franz Balthasar von Siebold was a German physician. He emerged as the first European to teach Western medicine in Japan. He obtained significance for his study of Japanese flora and fauna that were endemic to the unique biotic island landscape....
opened in 1990.

The nearby Clusius Garden is a 1931 re-creation (renovated in 1990) of Clusius' original garden, based on a plant list dating from the end of the 16th century.

From a scientific point of view, the Leiden Hortus is known for its collections of Asian Araceae

Araceae

Araceae is a family of monocotyledonous flowering plants in which flowers are borne on a type of inflorescence called a spadix. The spadix is usually accompanied by, and sometimes partially enclosed in, a spathe or leaf-like hood....
(among which the Amorphophallus titanum), Hoya
Hoya

Hoya is a genus of 200-300 species of tropical climbing plants in the family Apocynaceae , native to southern Asia , Australia, and Polynesia....
, Dischidia
Dischidia

Dischidia is a genus of plants in the Milkweed family, Asclepiadaceae. It comprises about 80 known species which all grow as epiphytes and are native to tropical areas of China, India and most areas of Indo China....
, Nepenthes
Nepenthes

The Nepenthes , popularly known as Tropical pitcher plants or Monkey Cups, are a genus of carnivorous plants in the monotypic family Nepenthaceae that comprises roughly 120 species, numerous List of Nepenthes natural hybrids and many cultivated hybrids....
, Asian orchids and fern

Fern

A fern is any one of a group of about 20,000 species of plants classified in the phylum or division Pteridophyta, also known as Filicophyta....
s.

Hortus Botanicus Leiden

History

Collection

External links