Delightful scientifick shade!
DENIS WOOD
The Oxford Botanic Garden was founded three hundred and fifty years ago this year — on St James's Day, July 25. The gardens at Padua and Pisa in Italy, Leyden in Holland and Montpellier in France are older, but the Oxford Physick Garden as it was first called, is the oldest in Britain, and except for the Chelsea Physic Garden, which is not open to the public, it is also the smallest. It is its smallness, three acres inside the walls, seven acres altogether, which in part accounts for its especial charm. Inside the Danby Gate enclosed by fourteen feet high walls, where the traffic noise recedes, it still retains the geometric logic and composure of its original design. It is a botanic garden in the true sense with long rectangular beds of plants in natural orders. In its economic quarter it still has beds of simples, medical plants in current use such as belladonna, colchicum and digitals, and collections of herbs and plants for flavours, hyssop, fennel and basil. There is also a historic rose collection of species and early hybrids illustrating the lines of development of our present day garden roses.
The Garden has acquired some fine trees, some good well-shaped specimens of fairly common ones such as Austrian Pine of 1800, a Manna Ash of 1790, a tall robust Red Chestnut of 1850, and some less common ones such as the Kentucky Coffee Tree, Gymnocladus dioica, given to the Garden by Mr Rogers of Balliol in 1835, its foliage among the most beautiful of all hardly trees — huge pinnate leaves meas uring three feet long by two feet wide; the Swamp Cypress, Taxodium distichum, planted about 1840, a deciduous conifer with light feathery foliage pale green and unbelievably beautiful against a blue sky in spring; the Pagoda Tree, Sophora japonica, from China (not Japan) planted about 1817 showing dedicated skills of expert tree surgery; a fine male specimen of the Tree of Heaven, Ailanthus altissima of 1850, and a tree by which I am particularly attracted for its fine masculine bone structure, Sorbus latifolia, the Service Tree of Fontainebleau, where it was discovered as a chance seedling early in the eighteenth century. There is a fine Judas Tree, Cercis siliquastrum (from south Europe and the Orient) about twenty-five feet high, very well pruned for shape, its flowers in May making a rose-purple mist through which Magdalen Tower rides across the High Street; also the rarer Cercis occidentalis (from California where it is known as the Western Redbud). The tree at Oxford, which has a distinctive rather contorted outline, is about fourteen feet high and again has rose-coloured flowers in May.
The founder of the Garden, Henry, Lord Danvers, was soldier, sailor, adventurer — a man of the Renaissance. Born in 1573 the second son of Sir John Danvers, knight, he was a page to Sir Philip Sidney, campaigner with Essex in the Low Countries and in France, knighted at Rouen, outlawed for his part in the murderous affray near his home in England, captain of a man of war in Essex's Islands Voyage. After his pardon in 1598 he began a long tour of service in Ireland under Mountjoy and Essex; he was governor of Armagh in 1601, the year in which his elder brother Charles was executed for his part in Essex's insurrection; he was governor of the island of Guernsey in 1621, the year in which his Physic Garden was opened. He had bought out the tenant of Paris Meade, five acres of meadow which up to 1290 had been a Jews' cemetery (a fact which is recorded in Hebrew and in English on a tablet on the outside of the wall to the west of the gateway), and conveyed the lease of it from Magdalen College to the University to further the study of plants used in medicine and for the improvement of botanical knowledge. Lord Danvers was created Earl of Danby by Charles I in 1626. In the meantime, the level of the Garden was raised against flooding by the River Cherwell by a massive deposition of ' mucke and dunge '. The great Danby Gate built by Nicholas Stone to designs by Inigo Jones was finished in 1632 (the statues of Charles I and Charles II were added in 1639, paid for out of a fine imposed on Anthony a Wood for a libel oh the Earl of Clarendon). The enclosing walls, fourteen feet high, were finished in 1633. Lord Danby died at his house at Cornbury in 1644 and was buried in the chancel of Dauntsey church.
There is no record of a Keeper of the Physic Garden until ten years after the completion of the walls and gateway. The great John Tradescant had been appointed Keeper in 1637 but died before he could take up the position. The first Keeper, Horti Praefectus, was the Brunswicker, Jacob Bobart, appointed in 1642 at the age of forty-three. He made a collection of plants and published, anonymously, a list of sixteen hundred in 1648. His second catalogue, compiled with the help of his son, also Jacob, was published ten years later. He appears to have been an original character with his enormous beard and habit of taking a goat as companion on his walks. Owing to the Civil War it was not until 1669 that the first Professor of Botany was appointed by Charles II. He was Dr Robert Morison of Aberdeen who, having fought on the Royalist side in the Civil War, went later to Paris where he studied botany under Vespasien Robin, and also anatomy and zoology before moving to the Loire valley where, having taken the degree of MD at Angers, he became one of the physicians to the Duke of Orleans and superintendent of his garden at Blois. From here he travelled widely in France, visiting among other plces Montpellier. At Blois he met Charles II who after the Restoration invited him to England to become Royal Physician, Superintendent of the Royal Gardens, and Professor of Botany. After this, according to Anthony a Wood, he spent the rest of his life in prosecuting his large design of publishing the universal knowledge of simples. At the time of his death only the last two of the intended three parts of this Plantarum Historiae Universitatis Oxoniensis were published, the first part on trees and shrubs never having been printed. He was later accused by Tournefort of vanity and plagiarism in his work. In his first ten years as Professor, Morison had the elder Bobart as Keeper, followed by his son, Jacob the Younger, who succeeded as Professor when Morison died after an accident in London in 1683. Although described by visiting foreigners as of mean and evil appearance, he was a hardworking, often unpaid, imaginative Professor. He made some of the first researches into the reproduction of plants and began a seed exchange service. It was in his time that the London Plane appeared in the Physic Garden possibly from a single unsuspected seed in a parcel of seed of the Oriental Plane sent from abroad or, as Miss Allan suggests in her book The Tradescants, as a plant found in Tradescant's garden and presented by John Tradescant the Younger, in memory of his father. The Younger Bobart's herbarium is now at the Batany School.
There was still no settled endowment for the stipend of Professor of Botany until the intervention of William Sherard, a dedicated botanist and inveterate traveller. He went from Merchant Taylors' School to St John's College, studied botany under Tournefort in Paris and Paul Hermann at Leyden. After travels in England and on the Continent he went to Smyrna (Izmir) in 1703 and spent the next fourteen years botanizing and exploring in Asia Minor and Greece, making a herbarium which he later gave to the Garden with a collection of rare plants and books and £500 towards enlarging the Conservatory. On his death in 1728 he made a bequest of £3,000 to provide the stipend, for a professor on condition that the University should contribute £150 a year towards the maintenance of the Garden and that Dillenius, whom he had brought back with him from Holland, should be the first Sherardian Professor.
John James Dillenius, a German born at Darmstadt, duly succeeded and in his term of office was visited in the Garden by Linnaeus. After some initial hostility the two apparently took to each other, Dil lenius asking Linnaeus to study with him and share his salary, and Linnaeus naming a genus after Dillenius. Dillenius's greatest work is his Historia Muscorum published In 1741. After him the chair was occupied by Humphrey Sibthorp, under whom little seems to have been accomplished in the Garden, although he was an active correspondent with botanists abroad, including Linnaeus who dedicted the genus Sithorpia to him. He resigned the profes sorship to his son, the great John Sibthorp who, after taking a degree at Oxford, con tinued his studies at Montpellier. Up to the time of John Sibthorp the Garden had been divided into quarters by paths at right angles bordered by stout yew hedges, access to the planted beds being through gates which were kept locked. Young Sibthorp had the hedges cut down along the path running from east to west. At this time there was an interlude where in 1785 the aeronaut, James Sadler, made an ascent in a balloon from the Garden watched by "a surprising concourse of people of all ranks, the roads, streets, fields, trees, buildings and towers of the parts adjacent being crowded beyond description."
Meanwhile' John Sibthorp was preparing for his two long journeys through Greece and Asia Minor. In 1786-87, taking with him Ferdinand Bauer to make drawings, he travelled in Crete, visited Athens, Smyrna, Constantinople, Cyprus and Rhodes, and seven years later returned on another expedition to Constantinople, Imbros, Athens again and Zante. At the end of this journey in 1795 he was taken ill and returned to England to die of consumption. In his will he left to the University all his books on natural history and an estate in Oxfordshire, the proceeds of which were to defray the cost of the publication of his Flora Graeca and also to endow a chair of Rural Economy. The publication of the Flora Graeca was finally completed in ten volumes in 1840 at a cost of £30,000.
John Sibthorp was succeeded as Professor by Dr George Williams of Corpus Christi. During his tenancy of the chair William Baxter, a Scot, was gardener and made an important collection of willows and grasses. Then came the great Dr Daubeney, the third, with Lord Danby and William Sherard, of the three who exerted the greatest influence on the Garden. Charles Giles Bridle Daubeney went from Winchester to Magdalen and studied medicine at Edinburgh. He then went to France to gather information on the geology and chemical history of the earth; he wrote A Description of Active and Extinct Volcanoes. He continued to practise medicine until 1829 but became Professor of Chemistry in 1822 and Professor of Botany in 1834, living in the Gardens. He was fortunate to have at his disposal on his installation £3,000, which inculded a gift of £500 from his predecessor. He set about the old Physic Garden with energy, changing the name to Botanic Garden, raising the levels still further against flooding, building greenhouses, the foundations of which remain and have dictated the ground plans of the new aluminium houses which have been built in the last three years. He raised trees from seeds
sent to him from collectors in Asia and America. Some of the conifers resulting from these, including a Monkey Puzzle, still exist in his small Pinetum to the west of the Garden. His interests had a chemical bias; for instance, he laid down beds by the side of the Cherwell to investigate the mineral requirements of plants. He set out his aims for the Garden in his popular Guide of 1864: "to bring it, if possible, into a condition calculated to enable students to qualify themselves in a branch of science as efficient as at any other similar institution by affording them representation of the leading features of most of the natural families capable of being illustrated by living plants and by supplying him with the means of studying the remainder by the aid of dried specimens" — aims corresponding closely to those of today. He seems to have been a companionably humorous man using the Garden for receptions, at one of which, when a garden party was given for the British Association in 1847, his friend Frank Buckland, a naturalist, brought with him his bear Tiglath Pileser in academical dress and introduced him to the company. Both Buckland and Daubeney also kept monkeys as pets, Daubeney's in cages let into the sides of the Danby Gateway.
To mark the occasion this year, the Bodleian Library will hold an exhibition which, it is hoped, will include Sibthorp's Flora Graeca, Morison's P/antarum Historiae Uni versitatis Oxoniensis, the original agreement between Lord Danby and Magdalen College, instructions from Lord Danby to the stonemasons for building the wall and gateway, a letter from the Younger Bobart asking for an increase in salary, Sherard's agreement and the foundation of a Botany Chair, records of visits by Evelyn and Pepys, prints by Loggan and Williams, portraits of the elder Bobart, Morison, Sibthorp and Daubeney. And may there be bears and balloons again.
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