Article suitable for older students

Aztec advances (22): botanical gardens

7th Oct 2024

Reconstruction of the botanical gardens of the Aztecs by Ruy Rojas Velasco

This is the twenty-second in a series of entries based on information in the Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World by Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield (Facts on File, 2002). If you search online for the ‘oldest botanical gardens in the world’, the Orto Botanico of Padua University, Italy, founded in 1544, usually features. However this is the oldest SURVIVING botanical garden. The FIRST must surely be the botanical gardens established by Mexica emperor Motecuhzoma I in 1467... (Compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

‘The Aztecs... planted lavish botanical gardens featuring enormous collections of plants both native to the area and imported from the tropical coast hundreds of miles distant... These arboretums, containing varieties of medicinal, hallucinatory, and sweet-smelling plants, were for the amusement and education of those who visited these sites... Not only were plants collected so that they could be preserved and displayed, they were also actively used as the basis for an elaborate system of plant classification and as laboratories for the discovery of medical breakthroughs... The Spaniards were astounded when they saw these Aztec gardens. Although some European monasteries had collections of plants in their herb gardens, they were small in comparison to the Aztec gardens.’

‘Experience in the gardens was reflected in the Aztecs’ extensive and scientifically accurate botanical and zoological taxonomy. The gardens were also used for medical research, plants were given free to patients on the condition that they report the results, and doctors were encouraged to experiment with the various plants’ (Ortiz de Montellano, 1990: 181).
Whether news of the Mexica gardens - commented on by Cortés in one of his letters to King Carlos V - inspired Italian botanists to establish similar facilities is hard to prove or disprove.
We agree to leave the last, conciliatory, word on this to Sophie Coe (1994: 42): ‘The last decade of the fifteenth century saw the re-publication in Venice of many of the botanical works of antiquity - interest in the world of plants was part of the Renaissance ferment. The best conclusion about the origin of the botanical garden is to consider it a joint effort, with the Old World and the New cooperating to add this weapon to the armament of science’.

Sources/references:-
• Coe, Sophie D. (1994): America’s First Cuisines, University of Texas Press
• Ortiz de Montellano, Bernard R. (1990): Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition, Rutgers University Press.

Picture sources:-
• Main: Illustration, based on the images in the Florentine Codex Book XI, composed by Ruy Rojas Velasco, scanned from Arqueología Mexicana, vol. X, no. 57, Sep-Oct 2002, p. 29
• Pic 1: photo by Eva Sánchez Fernández/Mexicolore
• Pic 2: image scanned from The Codex Borgia - A Full-Colour Restoration of the Ancient Mexican Manuscript by Gisele Díaz and Alan Rodgers, Dover Publications, New York, 1993.