The Role of Botanical Gardens in Biodiversity Research

Hanna Werblan-Jakubiec, Marcin Zych

Botanical gardens have fulfilled a variety of functions over the centuries, the most important being to assemble a wide diversity of plant collections and make them generally accessible. Initially, these collections chiefly comprised medicinal plants and were mostly used to educate future physicians and apothecaries. The first European gardens in Pisa and Padua were, strictly speaking, medical gardens. >>>