BOTANICAL GARDENS

Submitted by : Maria Aman Rana

Roll no. : 09
Submitted to : Dr. Iftikhar Ahmed
Botanic gardens
• Botanic gardens are institutions holding documented collections of
living plants for the purposes of scientific research, conservation,
display and education.
• Arboretum is a botanical garden devoted to trees.
• There are botanic gardens and arboreta in 148 countries worldwide and
they maintain more than 5 million living plant collections.
• Over 500 botanic gardens occur in Western Europe, more than 350 in
North America and over 200 in East and Southeast Asia, of which the
majority are in China. Most of the southern Asian botanic gardens are
to be found in India.
History
• Gardens and the cultivation of plants have been around for
thousands of years with the first examples dating to around 3000
years ago in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
• The Romans were also keen gardeners and they were also aware
of the medicinal properties of plants. The Romans in identifying
the medicinal properties of plants were the monks.
• The first of these monastic gardens was created in the 8th
century.
• Therefore the world’s first botanic gardens were the physic
gardens of Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries.
History
• The first of these physic gardens was the garden of the
University of Pisa which was created by Luca Ghini in 1543.
• The other Italian universities gardens were created in Padova
(1545), Firenze (1545) and Bologna (1547). These gardens were
purely for the academic study of medicinal plants.
• The University of Oxford botanic garden was the first garden
established in the United Kingdom in 1621 with a mission to
promote learning and the glory of god.
History
• Botanic gardens then experienced a change in usage during the 16th
and 17th century. This was the age of exploration and the beginnings
of international trade. Gardens such as the Royal Botanic Gardens,
Kew and the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid were set up to try and
cultivate new specie.
• The British established Calcutta Botanic Gardens in 1787 while the
French set up Pamplemousse Botanic Gardens in Mauritius in 1735.
Missouri botanic garden is the first botanic gardens to be established
in the United States of America in 1859. The U.S. Botanic Garden has
been continuously operating and open to the public since 1850, and its
plant collection was established and has been maintained since 1842.
The Botanical Gardens of Padua University as
seen in a 16th Century Print
Largest gardens
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (1840)
• Kyoto Botanical Garden, Japan.(founded in 1942)
• Brooklyn Botanic Garden, America (1910)
• Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden,South africa (1913).
• Montreal Botanical Garden, Canada(1931)
• Singapore Botanic Gardens,(1859)
• Botanic garden in Potsdam()
Kew Botanic garden, London
• Covering over 120 hectares, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew
make up one of the oldest and most famous gardens in the world.
Kew houses the largest and most diverse botanical and mycological
collections in the world.
• The collections include around 7 million dried plant specimens in
the Herbarium; Kew contains over 30,000 living taxa .
• The Fungarium containing 1.25 million dried fungal specimens; over
150,000 glass slides detailing plant micro-traits; 95,000 economic
botany specimens; the world’s largest wild plant DNA and tissue
bank (including 50,000 DNA samples representing over 35,000
species) nd over 2 billion seeds (from around 35,000 species) in the
Millennium Seed Bank
Kew Botanic garden, London
Botanic garden in pakistan
• Botanic Gardens in Pakistan.
• Approximately no. of living plant accessions recorded in these botanic gardens
are estimated as no more than 5,000.
• Bagh-e-Jinnah, Lahore
• Rani Bagh Arboretum, Hyderabad
• Sukh Chayn Gardens, Lahore
• Botanical Garden, University of the Punjab, Quaid-e-Azam Campus, Lahore
• Faisalabad Botanical Gardens (part of Gatwala Wildlife Park), Faisalabad
• Government College University Botanic Garden of GCU, Lahore
• Karachi University Botanic Garden of Karachi University, Karachi
• Lahore Botanical Gardens, Lahore
• Pakistan Forest Institute Botanical Garden of Pakistan Forest Institute, Peshawar
• Quaid-i-Azam University Botanical Garden, Islamabad
Role of botanic gardens
• Following are the role of botanical garden
• The conservation of plants
• The education of the people who come to see them.
• Play a role in the mitigation of the effects of climate change.
• Research
• Maintain the genetic diversity