"The Gardeners of Eden: A bouquet of exotic flowers was one
trophy of European expansion"
 
by Samuel M. Wilson
 
in Natural History (July 1992 pp. 20-23)
 
     Gardens and gardening flourished during the Italian
Renaissance, reflecting both the rebirth of interest in classical
philosophy and aesthetics and the emergence of the natural
sciences.  The remarkable Natural History written by Pliny the
Elder (A.D. 23-79) was resurrected as holy writ by Renaissance
gardeners.  Pliny's principles are still adhered to in modern
gardens, especially his emphasis on integrating the rooms of the
villa with the "rooms" of the garden and the importance of
maintaining harmony between the villa garden and the surrounding
landscape.
     The villa at Careggi was just one of the country estates
that the Medici family of Florence owned in the late 1400s, but
its Renaissance garden was Lorenzo de' Medici's favorite.  He
spared no expense in researching and obtaining the most exotic
plants for it: a fifteenth-century poem by Alexander Bracci lists
more than 100 species that Lorenzo planted.  Leonardo da Vinci,
who lived from 1452 to 1519, spent considerable time at Careggi,
creating sculpture and perhaps even designing parts of his
patron's cherished garden.  As botanist William Emboden has
shown, Leonardo was as passionate a student of botany as he was
of nearly everything else in his world.  His voluminous notebooks
contain thousands of detailed sketches of plants, with notes on
their characteristics (set down in his mirror-image handwriting),
as well as sketches of gardens.
     More than four centuries later, in another country, I too
keep a garden.  Mine is certainly not as impressive by any
measure, even compared with those on our street.  But my
international hodgepodge of plants would have thrilled Lorenzo
de' Medici, Leonardo da'Vinci, and Pliny the Elder.  Leonardo
never saw the explosion of New World plants in the gardens of
Europe and the rest of the world.  He mentions only one or two
Native American plants in his notebooks--corn (maize) and
possibly a New World bean.  He died just as Cortes's expedition
was making its way toward the Aztec capitol and some of the
world's most remarkable gardens.  So Leonardo never tasted
chocolate, one of the things Cortes brought to Europe.
     Describing the extraordinary things Cortes and his army say
in Montezuma's palaces, Bernal Dias del Castillo wrote, in The
Discovery and Conquest of Mexico:
     
We must not forget the gardens of flowers and sweet-scented
trees, and the many kinds that there were of them, and the
arrangements of them and the walks, and the ponds and tanks of
fresh water where the water enter at one end and flowed out of
the other; and the baths which he had there, and the variety of
small birds that nested in the branches, and the medicinal and
useful herbs that were in the gardens.  It was a wonder to see,
and to take care of it there were many gardeners.
 
     The sixteenth-century chronicler Fernando de Alva
Ixtilochitl was born to a noble Aztec family but educated in
Spanish mission schools.  In his Historia Chichimeca he described
the precinct of the aristocracy as a huge walled park, containing
palaces, temples, and the buildings of the state bureaucracy. 
The rest of the precinct was given over to gardens
 
with many fountains, ponds and canals, many fish and birds, and
the whole planted with more than two thousand pines...and there
were several mazes, according to where the king bathed; and once
a man was in he could not find the way out...and farther on,
beside the temples, there was the bird-house, where the king kept
all the kinds and varieties of birds, animals, reptiles, and
serpents that they brought him from every part of New Spain; and
those which were not to be had were represented in gold and
precious stones--which was also the case with the fish, both
those of the sea and those that lived in rivers and lakes.  So no
bird, fish or animal of the whole country was wanting here they
were either alive of figured in gold and gems.
 
     In the 1570s, Francisco Hernandez and a group of Aztec
artists and draftsmen make a large compendium of Aztec plants. 
Unfortunately, the original drawings, containing additional
notations and details in the Aztec language, Nahuatl, were
destroyed in 1671 with a large part of the famous library at El
Escorial, a Spanish palace and monastery.  But copies of them
appear in Historia Naturae Maxime Peregrinae (1635), by the
Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg.
     Another source describing the Aztec flora is the 1552
Badianus Manuscript.  This extraordinary catalog of medicinal
plants, with still-vivid, natural-dye illustrations, was made by
two Aztec scholars educated at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de
Tlateloco.  Martinus de la Cruz composed the text, and Juannes
Badianus translated it into Latin.  This book sat in the Vatican
library for nearly four centuries before its facsimile was
published in 1940. 
     Many of the New World's most spectacular contributions to
modern gardens were slow to appear in Europe.  The conquerors
paid more attention to crops that could be profitably sold.  Two
of the most addictive, and thus more profitable, were cacao (the
source of chocolate) and tobacco.  Tomatoes were slower to catch
on in Europe, only becoming widely grown in the late nineteenth
century, surprising as this may seem to those of us somewhat
addicted to tomatoes.
     Potatoes, squashes, pumpkins, arrowroot, manioc, and other
food plants were not addicting but became popular and important
in many parts of the world.  Some Native American crops, like the
peanut, have come into their own in the last century or so.  And
some, like the wonderful Jerusalem artichoke, a member of the
sunflower family, have not yet become popular but should (its
intriguing name is a corruption of the Italian girasole, meaning
"turn to the son").
     The chili pepper (Capsicum annuum and others) well
illustrates the massive diffusion of plants that has taken place
since 1492.  In his journal of the first voyage, Columbus noted:
 
There is also much chili, which is their pepper, of a kind more
valuable than [black] pepper, and none of the people eat without
it, for they find it very healthy.  Fifty caravels can be loaded
with each year in Hispaniola.
 
     This remarkable plant--domesticated, bred into dozens of
varieties, and cultivated in the New World for thousands of
years--made its way around the globe in just a few decades.  The
spicy cuisines of South Asia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Sichuan in
China are unimaginable without chili.
     Scholars have often noted the dramatic effect of the
exchange of New and Old World food plants--including corn,
potatoes, and tomatoes going one way and wheat, rice, and bananas
going the other.  In sheer numbers of species.  Ironically, many
domesticated and well-bred New world ornamental plants, left to
fend for themselves when their gardeners died or left their
gardens, were rediscovered by Europeans as "wild" flowers.
     The twelve species of dahlias grown by the Aztecs were
warmly received in Europe, but they did not reach England until
1790.  The zinnias and marigolds were probably grown earlier in
Spain and other Mediterranean countries but were first recorded
in England in 1753.  The glories lilies of the Andean Incan
gardeners, such as the hardy amaryllis, the Peruvian lily, and
rain lilies, are widely cultivated today.  Both Incan and Aztec
gardeners grew many varieties of bromeliads (relatives of the
pineapple, another New World domesticate), whose vast family
spreads over all the tropical Americas (see "Epiphytes of El
Yunque, Puerto Rico," Natural History, October 1991).
     Others among the countless New World flowers in global
cultivation are phlox, morning glory, fuchsias, Michaelmas,
daises, and yuccas.  Anyone who gardens is probably growing New
World domesticates, including those who dedicate all their
efforts to trying to grow the elusive 1,000-pound pumpkin. 
Thousands of wildflowers are also finding increasing popularity
among gardeners.  Just a few of the sophisticated native plants I
have growing in my garden are the primrose, Mexican mint
marigold, butterfly weed, black-eyed Susan, and hairy zexmenia.
     Such wild plants are the raw material for gardeners.  With
food crops, cultivators can select for edible wild plants that
yield more food per plant, are better suited to particular
conditions, more hardy, and so forth.  Gardeners select blooms
and foliage for size, form, texture, and color.  Five hundred
years ago, the New World, Asia, and Africa were full of raw
material for plant domestication, while Europe had relatively
little.  In The Principles of Gardening, Hugh Johnson argues that
the flora of Europe suffered much greater damage during the last
glaciation than did that of Asia and the Americas.  In North
America and China, plant communities survived by migrating
southward as the glaciers crept forward, and they recolonized as
the glaciers retreated.  European plants were cut off by the
Mediterranean Sea, and only the most hardy survived.
     Europe's colonial expansion changed that,and Europeans
gardens began to fill with the exotic flowers of Africa, Asia,
and, eventually, the Americas.  The rose represents a delightful
combination of the musk rose of the Mediterranean and Near east
and the Chinese rose, neither of which in its wild form is as
glorious as the hybrid offspring.  The Renaissance painter
Botticelli sprinkled some of the early hybrid roses in the
background of The Birth of Venius.  We have seen only a few
centuries of the combination and recombination of the lesser-
known species in the world's flora, and other startling hybrids
have yet to appear.
     Europe's expansion was driven by a growing population and an
even faster growing aristocracy, which generated a demand for
gold, spices, and other rare and exotic goods.  Columbus sailed
west to find a quicker route to these luxuries, a good shipload
of which--safely delivered--could allow a captain to retire for
life.  While they might seem secondary in importance to economic
crops, exotic ornamental plants, destined to grace the celebrated
gardens o f the Renaissance aristocracy, were valued for their
aesthetic properties.  Just as I can imagine an Aztec king
conquering whole provinces to obtain the twelfth dahlia, I am
confident Lorenzo de'Medici would have been willing to pay more
than the total cost of Columbus's first voyage to get a few more
specimens for his garden at Careggi.
 
 
 
 
 
 
With permission from Natural History, July 1992; Copyright the
American Museum of Natural History, 1992.
 
WILSON01.ART