The Seeds of Botany 
In 1545, the establishment of Europe’s first botanical garden 
in Padua, Italy, ended centuries of dependence 
on the ancients and set an example for plant research 
by Thomas A. Christopher 
To the tourist happily savoring its 
antiquities, the lovely city of Padua, 
twenty-two miles west of Venice, 
seems like an island in time — a place 
so venerable that it scarcely appears 
relevant to our modern technological 
society. Yet on June 29, 1545, one 
of the seminal events of modern sci- 
ence occurred in this small, northern 
Italian city. On that date the senate 
of the Venetian Republic, which then 
ruled Padua, voted to establish at the 
University of Padua the first botanical 
garden in Europe. The unforeseen con- 
sequence was nothing less than a rev- 
olution in the plant sciences, the awak- 
ening of botany from a thousand years 
of stagnation. 
In the sixteenth century Padua was 
one of the intellectual centers of Eu- 
rope, the home of a great university 
with a science faculty second to none. 
The Renaissance was in full flower, 
and under its influence, scholars in 
all fields were throwing off the con- 
straints of medieval dogmatism and 
making great advances. The Univer- 
sity of Padua was particularly noted 
as a center for botanical learning; in 
1533 it had been the first European 
university to appoint a full-time pro- 
fessor of botany. 
That there had not been a single 
university chair in botany previous to 
1533 is an indication of the low state 
into which the plant sciences had 
fallen in medieval Europe. As a sci- 
ence, botany hardly existed; what in- 
terest there was in plants was purely 
practical. The only plants medieval 
scholars had bothered to study were 
those they Relieved had economic or 
medicinal value, and doctors almost 
entirely dominated the plant sciences. 
A medieval doctor had to have some 
rudimentary knowledge of plants since 
they were the major source of drugs, 
but even among doctors botanical re- 
search was unheard-of. They preferred 
to gain their knowledge of plants from 
ancient Greek and Roman texts. 
Theophrastus (3727-287? b.c.) and 
Dioscorides (a.d. 407-90?) were two 
ancient Greek botanists whose works 
were especially influential in medieval 
Europe; Dioscorides, in particular, was 
considered the final authority on ev- 
erything related to plants. Both were 
fairly reliable sources of information 
given the limitations of their times. 
Theophrastus was by far the better 
scientist, demonstrating in his work 
keen powers of observation and de- 
ductive reasoning. Many of his the- 
ories were remarkably accurate and 
obviously based on the careful study 
of living plants, both native and for- 
eign. Alexander the Great (356-323 
b.c.), on his expeditions to Persia and 
India, took trained personnel to collect 
and send back many exotic plants and 
seeds. Theophrastus was thus able to 
study Asian plants as well as the flora 
of Greece; he supposedly maintained 
collections of foreign plants in his gar- 
den in Athens. 
Symptomatic of the poverty of me- 
dieval plant science, Dioscorides’ De 
Materia Medica, which was little 
more than a handbook of medicinal 
plants, was in general preferred to 
Theophrastus’ more scholarly works. 
Worse yet, what real value De Materia 
Medica had was largely overlooked. 
Dioscorides, while he lacked Theo- 
phrastus’ energetic spirit of inquiry, 
did emphasize the importance of field- 
work and the observation of living 
plants. Medieval scholars, however, 
chose to ignore this aspect of his book. 
The natural result of the absence 
of primary research during the Middle 
Ages was that although some scholars 
were learned in ancient botanical lit- 
erature, most were surprisingly igno- 
rant about the native plants of their 
region. The botanical illustrations in- 
cluded in medieval editions of Dios- 
corides’ De Materia Medica clearly 
reflect this lack of knowledge. Many 
of the plants Dioscorides described 
can be found growing wild throughout 
northern Europe, and yet almost with- 
out exception the illustrations were 
mechanically copied from earlier edi- 
tions of the same book rather than 
drawn from nature. In this way, each 
new edition perpetuated the errors of 
its predecessors and perhaps added 
a few of its own, so that the illus- 
trations in the editions published to- 
ward the end of the Middle Ages bear 
little if any resemblance to the plants 
they purport to represent. 
Medieval scholars made almost no 
attempt to investigate the anatomy of 
plants, their mechanisms of growth 
and reproduction, or the ways in which 
they were related to one another. Even 
the basic concept that different geo- 
graphical regions have different floras, 
which Theophrastus had grasped in 
an elementary form, was not under- 
stood. Throughout the Middle Ages, 
northern European doctors used Dios- 
corides as their standard reference for 
identifying medicinal plants without 
appreciating that many of the plants 
he described were indigenous to 
Greece or the Middle East and simply 
not to be found in England, France, 
or Germany. 
Many of these conditions persisted 
in the early part of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. Even at the University of Padua, 
botany was considered nothing more 
than a branch of the medical cur- 
riculum. Although the university did 
boast the only professor of plant sci- 
ence in Europe, his official title was 
lettore dei semplici, or the professor 
of simples (simples is an archaic term 
for medicinal plants). 
The professorship was established 
at the urging of Francesco Bonafede, 
a professor of medicine. Significantly, 
Bonafede, considered the best-quali- 
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