Monastic infirmary gardens and, later, university and apothecaries' physic gardens grew medicinal and culinary herbs for study and use. They are the ancestors of botanic gardens and the modern herb garden.
Overview¶
Before pharmacies sold ready-made drugs, medicines were made from plants, and the people who made them grew those plants. In early medieval Europe that meant monasteries, which cared for the sick and kept Latin medical texts. From the 16th century, universities and apothecaries built physic gardens, living collections for teaching the identification of medicinal plants. Many became the great botanic gardens of today, and their neat rectangular beds are the model for the formal herb garden. See planning a herb garden.
The monastery garden¶
The Rule of St Benedict required monasteries to care for the sick, and larger houses kept an infirmary with its own garden. The best early evidence is the Plan of St Gall, an idealised architectural drawing of a Benedictine monastery made around 820–830 and preserved at the abbey of St Gall in Switzerland. It shows a small physic garden (herbularius) beside the physician's house, with sixteen beds named for plants including sage, rosemary, rue, mint, fennel, savory, cumin, lovage, lilies and roses, and a separate, larger kitchen garden with onions, garlic, parsley, coriander, chervil, dill and poppy.
Around the same time, Charlemagne's Capitulare de villis (c. 800) listed plants to be grown on royal estates, a list that overlaps closely with the St Gall plan. The abbot Walafrid Strabo of Reichenau wrote Hortulus (the little garden), a Latin poem of the 840s describing his own garden plant by plant, from sage to chervil to rue.
Monastic gardens were not only medicinal. Many herbs served the kitchen, the brewhouse and the church (for strewing and incense), and the line between them was loose.
📌 Folklore: "monks invented herb X"
Many herbs, liqueurs and blends are said to have been created or introduced by monks. Some are well documented, such as the Carthusian liqueur Chartreuse; others are later marketing or local tradition. Monasteries certainly spread plants across Europe, but individual origin stories should be treated with caution.
University physic gardens¶
The Renaissance revival of Dioscorides raised a problem: which living plants matched the names in the ancient texts? Universities answered by planting gardens where medical students could see the plants themselves.
| Date | Garden |
|---|---|
| 1544 | Pisa, founded by Luca Ghini under Cosimo I de' Medici |
| 1545 | Padua, founded by the Venetian Republic; the oldest university botanic garden still on its original site, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site |
| 1545 | Florence (Giardino dei Semplici) |
| 1590 | Leiden; Carolus Clusius became its prefect in 1593 |
| 1621 | Oxford Physic Garden, now the University of Oxford Botanic Garden, the oldest in Britain |
| 1670 | Edinburgh, precursor of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh |
| 1673 | Chelsea Physic Garden, London, founded by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries |
At Leiden, Clusius grew tulips from bulbs sent from the Ottoman Empire, contributing to their spread in the Netherlands. Gardens were laid out in geometric beds, often grouped by medical use or later by botanical family.
Chelsea Physic Garden¶
The Society of Apothecaries established its garden on the Thames at Chelsea in 1673 to train apprentices in plant identification. In 1722 Sir Hans Sloane, who had bought the manor of Chelsea, granted the Society the land for a nominal rent of £5 a year in perpetuity, on condition that it keep the garden going and send specimens to the Royal Society. Under its gardener Philip Miller (in post 1722–1770), author of the Gardeners Dictionary, it became one of the most important plant collections in Europe, exchanging seeds with gardens across the world. The garden still grows medicinal and culinary plants and is open to the public.
From physic garden to botanic garden¶
As European empires expanded, gardens began to collect plants of economic value as well as medicine. Kew, founded as a royal garden in 1759, became a hub for moving plants such as cinchona and rubber between colonies, a role tied closely to imperial agriculture. The shift from "physic" to "botanic" reflects medicine and botany becoming separate disciplines. See herbals and herbalists.
After the Dissolution¶
In England, Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries (1536–1541) ended monastic gardening. Knowledge of herbs passed to manor houses, cottage gardens, apothecaries and printed herbals. The cottage garden, with thyme, marjoram, chives, borage and lavender among the flowers, owes something to this dispersal.
Visiting and recreating¶
Reconstructed medieval herb gardens exist at many European abbeys and museums, often based on the St Gall list. For a small home version, choose a sunny, well-drained spot and plant perennials such as sage, thyme, rosemary, lovage and hyssop in square beds with paths between, adding annuals such as dill and chervil each spring. See annual and perennial herbs.