The First Botanical Gardens in Geneva (C

The first botanical gardens in Geneva (c. 1750–1830): private initiative leading science rene´ sigrist & patrick bungener Although botany has been practised since Antiquity and the existence of largely justified, since after his return to his native town (1816) Candolle botanical gardens has been developing since the middle of the sixteenth founded a school of systematic botany the aim of which was no less than to century, it was not until the eighteenth century that botany acquired the status describe all the existing plants on earth. 4 This Systema regni vegetabilis , renamed of an autonomous science, with some professional botanists earning their Prodromus systematis naturalis vegetabilis after 1821, was to mobilize 35 fellow living as professors, garden directors or travelling explorers. The historical and scholars in order to describe more than 58,000 species. When completed in sociological features of the rising ‘Republic of botanists’ 1 still remain to be 1873, the work totalled 17 volumes and 13,000 pages in folio. However, in a studied in their entirety, because most of the existing researches on botany, as a talk on the history of botany in Geneva delivered in 1830, Candolle social phenomenon, have focused either on one type of institution — usually recognized the part played by his fellow countrymen, especially Charles 2 the garden — or on the popularization of knowledge. These and other studies Bonnet, Jean Senebier and Nicolas Theódore de Saussure, in the development on the history of botany have shown how that science became independent of of plant physiology. 5 So, if taxonomic botany thus started rather late in its original medical purposes (and from faculties of medicine), how the ‘natural Geneva, this is not the case for other aspects of plant science and agriculture, methods’ of classification gradually organized the arrangement of plants in the nor for the sciences as a whole. In fact, the interpretation of the history of main gardens, and how public interest in exotic plants increased. botany depended largely on how the word ‘botany’ was understood. Had The aim of this paper is to describe the development of botany in a small city, ‘plant physics’ and agricultural science to be included in botany, or not? Geneva, which cannot be considered as one of the major centres of research on Eighteenth-century scientists were divided on the question. But for Candolle’s plants in the eighteenth century, except for the field of plant physiology. predecessors in Geneva, the answer was unquestionably yes. 6 In other words, Focusing on the genesis of the first private and public gardens, it examines the local botany already had a substantial history before 1816. popularity of botany in the Age of Enlightenment and the kind of demands for As a city of modest size, with about 26,000 inhabitants at the end of the knowledge and practical applications that it was supposed to meet and fulfil. eighteenth century, Geneva could not compete with Paris, London, Berlin, Stockholm, St Petersburg, Bologna and the other scientific capitals of the Botany and natural sciences in Geneva in the second half of the time. 7 A small republic, allied to the Swiss cantons since the Reformation, it eighteenth century was a ‘political atom’ of about 65 patrician families ruling over the citizens and In his Me´moires et Souvenirs ,3 Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778–1841) other inhabitants of the city, as well as over 10,000 rural subjects. As a presents himself as the creator of modern botany in Geneva. This claim is stronghold of Calvinist Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth issn 1460-1176 # 2008 taylor & francis vol. 28, nos 3&4 333 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: sigrist & bungener centuries, it enjoyed a European reputation and Calvin’s academy — the local Georges-Louis Lesage to achieve a European fame. But from 1740 onwards, institution of higher learning — strengthened its intellectual life in theology the major contributions of local scientists were in the experimental sciences, and philology, later in natural law as well as natural sciences. In fact, Calvinist especially in the fields of animal and plant physiology (Charles Bonnet, Orthodoxy evolved at the very end of the seventeenth century towards a form Abraham Trembley and Jean Senebier), geology (Jean-Andre´ Deluc, Horace of rational and liberal theology, so that the teaching at the academy was Beńe´dict de Saussure), electricity (Jean Jallabert) and meteorology (Marc- reshaped accordingly. From 1700 onwards, the principles of reason and the Auguste Pictet). Botany, especially systematics, was not among these privileged idea of nature guided the teaching of theology and law, so that modern science fields, despite the many local farmers’ interest in agronomic improvements, and philosophy played a key role in the training of the local elites, protestant and the growing popularity of Rousseau — a lover of nature and botany — ministers as well as civil magistrates. The acquisition of an ‘ esprit de geóme´trie ’ among the craftsmen and the bourgeoisie. and the expression of clear and correct ideas were considered crucial to the Thus, the practice of botany started modestly in the 1750s with the training of the mind of the students, and to the refutation of all deistic and scientific exploration of the neighbouring Savoy Alps. Much earlier, in the atheistic sophisms. sixteenth century, Jean Bauhin had tried to establish the first botanical By the middle of the eighteenth century, the French ‘ Philosophes ’ looking garden in the city, on the Petit Languedoc, in order to show the medicinal for a republican model happened to consider Geneva as a symbol of plants to his students (1568–1570). 12 But this attempt had few lasting results, Enlightenment. They thus created a new myth, in spite of the oligarchic except for a local botanist named Dominique Chabrey, who, in 1650–1651, character of the city-state. 8 In fact, the climate of intellectual tolerance that decided to publish Bauhin’s Historia plantarum universalis (3 vols). In 1666 seemed to make the status of ‘citizen of Geneva’ so desirable was much less followed a Stirpium sciagraphica et icones based on the specimens of Chabrey’s exotic for the Englishmen than it was for the Frenchmen. The natural collection, and perhaps of his own garden. In fact, the only botanical theology advocated in Geneva by Jean-Robert Chouet and Jean-Alphonse activity in Geneva until the middle of the eighteenth century happened to Turrettini, two leading intellectuals of the late seventeenth century, had be herborizations by foreigners, besides the agronomical attempts under- already been common in England since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and taken by local gentlemen farmers. One of the few significant publications in even since the Restoration of 1661. 9 The idea that the study of nature is that field was Nicolas Fatio de Duillier’s Fruit Walls Improved , in 1699 another way to look for God was a commonplace of the Boyle Lectures and (figure 2.1). was already in the minds of the founders of the Royal Society (1663). In Half a century later, a few experiments carried out by Jean-Louis Calandrini Geneva, mathematics and mechanics were the first sciences to benefit from and by his disciple Jacques-Andre´ Trembley on the generation of plants and that new intellectual climate, but natural and experimental sciences, as well as the movements of leaves, inspired the larger investigations of Charles Bonnet astronomy, were to follow soon. 10 (1720–1793) in the field of ‘plant physics’. 13 In fact, Bonnet’s well-known Modern science made its way in Geneva with the introduction of Cartesian Recherches sur l’usage des feuilles dans les plantes (1754) shows the real beginning philosophy and science at the local Academy (1670), and with the of plant science in Geneva. Walking in the steps of Stephen Hales and experimental teaching of Jean-Robert Chouet, one of its philosophy Duhamel du Monceau, Bonnet conducted various sets of systematic professors. 11 The existence in the late seventeenth century of an important experiments on the absorption of sap by the leaves, on the different functions medical school, lead by Theóphile Bonet, Jean-Jacques Manget and Daniel Le of their two surfaces, on the movements of leaves and stalks, and how heat and Clerc, also contributed to the emergence of modern science. However, the light influenced them. 14 He also described, with the help of coloured real beginning of an indigenous tradition of research in Geneva only came in injections, the circulation of sap in the plants and the phenomenon of the early 1720s, with the conversion to Newtonian science. That change of etiolation, caused by a lack of light, studied the role of cotyledons and showed, paradigm allowed mathematicians and physicists like Gabriel Cramer, Jean- by rigorous experimentation, that the supposed degeneration of wheat in Louis Calandrini (both disciples of Johann I and Niklaus I Bernoulli) and ryegrass was a legend. 334 the first botanical gardens in geneva reproduction of cryptogams, especially the algae. As the first taxonomist of some significance to practise in Geneva, he was interested in classifying species in natural families along the great chain of beings, and put a great emphasis on the physiological characteristics of the various groups of plants. Summing up these developments in a discourse on Geneva botany in 1830, Augustin Pyramus de Candolle underlined that in the eighteenth century his fellow citizens’ attention had been quite exclusively focused on plant physiology, so that they paid little attention to the field of descriptive botany. 18 He explained this trend by the interest of the local scientists for natural theology, most of them being — as mathematicians or physicists — ‘more attracted by the stimulating but often disappointing study of causes than by the more modest, but more certain, observation of facts and of the links figure 2.1.

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