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Bryan Zwalinski, age 13, of Montgomery, Ala., for his question:

WHERE WAS THE FIRST BOTANICAL GARDEN?

A botanical garden is a garden in which plants are grown and displayed primarily for scientific and educational purposes. We don't know exactly where the first botanical garden was located but we do know that one of the first was established in ancient Athens about 340 B.C. by Aristotle and run by one of his pupils, Theophrastus.

The oldest public botanical gardens in the world are those established at Pisa, Italy, in 1543, at Padua, Italy, in 1545, at Paris, France, in 1635, and at Berlin, Germany, in 1679.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, herbalists cultivated medicinal herbs in private gardens. In 1673, the Society of Apothecaries planted the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, England, to provide materials for research and medicine.

The first experimental botanical garden in the United States was one established by the American botanist John Bartram near Philadelphia, in 1728.

Today, almost every major city has a botanical garden that consists chiefly of collections of living plants, grown out of doors or under glass in greenhouses and conservatories. The gardens usually include collections of dried plants or herbariums, and such facilities as lecture rooms, study halls, laboratories, libraries, museums and experimental or research plantings.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, better known as Kew Gardens, near London, was founded in 1759. Today it is the largest botanical garden in the world. Experiments and research done there have led to the transplanting of commercially reproductive crops, such as rubber, from their native habitats to other parts of the world.

More than 300 botanical gardens are in the U.S. Among the most important are the Missouri Botanic Gardens in St. Louis (1859), the New York Botanical Garden in Bronx Park, New York City (1895) and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York City.

The best known arboretum in the U.S. is the Arnold Arboretum, which was established in 1872 at Harvard University in Massachusetts.

The plants in a botanical garden may be arranged according to one or more subdivisions of botanical science. The arrangements may be systematic (by plant classification), ecological (by relation to environment) or geographic (by region of origin).

The larger botanical gardens often include special groupings, such as rock gardens, water gardens, wildflower gardens and collections of horticultural groups reproduced by plant breeding, such as roses or tulips.

The establishment of botanical gardens came about because men were interested in the study of botany. And man has been interested in plants for a long time. Because civilization rests in part on a knowledge of plants and their cultivation, botany can be said to have originated with the first cultivation of crops perhaps some 100,000 years ago.

Not until about 2,300 years ago, however, did humans become interested in plants for their own sake. Thus botany as a pure science didn't begin until about the 4th Century B.C. in ancient Athens.

 

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