Hortus Botanicus

Garden · Plantage (Centrum)Amsterdam,Netherlands

A 1638 Amsterdam physic garden that became the potting shed of empire, four thousand species on 1.2 hectares, coffee and oil palm among them.

Hortus Botanicus is 1.2 hectares with roughly four thousand species packed into it, and two of the plants that passed through changed what large parts of the world now farm. One was coffee: a plant raised here went to Louis XIV in 1714, and by the usual account the coffee of the Americas descends from cuttings taken from it. The other was the oil palm, and most of the Southeast Asian crop descends from seedlings planted at Bogor in Java in 1848, two of them from Amsterdam. It began in 1638 as the Hortus Medicus, a working supply of raw material: Amsterdam's doctors and apothecaries needed the plants their medicines were made of, so the city grew them. Within fifty years the job had changed, because ships were coming in with species no one in Europe had seen. The garden moved to this ground in the Plantage in 1682, and Jan Commelin set about describing and publishing what arrived. A plant could be landed, potted, drawn, named and sent on again. Walk the beds now and you are crossing a garden that was planted to stock medicine chests and ended up holding plants from the far side of the world.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come in spring or summer for the outdoor beds — from spring the open ground carries the systematic beds and the bulbs, while through winter the garden is effectively glasshouses and bare soil.
Read the labels for where a plant grows wild — the South African, Indonesian and Caribbean origins listed on them are the garden's own history, bed by bed.
Save the three-climate house for last — its desert, subtropical and tropical rooms run in sequence behind doors, and going from cold outdoor beds straight into the tropical end is the sharpest change here.
Do not expect a butterfly hall — the butterfly house is one small, very warm room off the glasshouses, hot enough to fog glasses and a camera lens within seconds of entering.

Things to do

1
Cross three climates in a few paces
Enter the three-climate glasshouse at the desert end and walk straight through without stopping. In a dozen steps the air goes from dry and sharp to heavy and wet, and the leaves change from ribbed and spined to broad and dripping. It is the fastest lesson in why leaf shape follows rainfall.
2
Find the cycad that has no wild population left
Go to the back of the 1912 glasshouse and stand beside the Eastern Cape cycad: a squat scaly trunk with a crown of stiff fronds, its scales old leaf bases stacked up like a record of every year. Then read the labels along the bench. Several of these species have no wild plants left at all, and Encephalartos woodii is known from one male plant found in South Africa in 1895 — every one alive is a cutting of it.