The Jardin des Plantes (French pronunciation: [ʒaʁdɛ̃ de plɑ̃t] , lit. 'Garden of the Plants'), known as the Jardin des Plantes de Paris (French: [- də paʁi]) when distinguished from those in other cities, is the main botanical garden in France. Jardin des Plantes is the official name, shortened from Jardin Royal des Plantes Médicinales, as the original purpose of the garden in the 17th century was to grow medicinal plants.
Headquarters of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History, part of Sorbonne University), the Jardin des Plantes covers 28 hectares of the 5th arrondissement of Paris, on the left bank of the river Seine. The entire garden and its contained buildings, archives, libraries, greenhouses, ménagerie (a zoo), works of art, and specimens' collection are a national historical landmark (monument historique).
The grounds of the Jardin des Plantes include four buildings containing exhibited specimens. These buildings are officially museums (musée de France) but the French Museum of Natural History calls them galeries:
The Grande Galerie de l'Évolution ('Gallery of Evolution') was inaugurated in 1889 as the Galerie de Zoologie ('Gallery of Zoology'). In 1994, the gallery was renamed Grande Galerie de l'Évolution, and its exhibited specimens were completely reorganised so that the visitor is oriented by the common thread of evolution as the major subject treated by the gallery.
The Galerie de Minéralogie et de Géologie ('Gallery of Mineralogy and Geology'), a mineralogy museum, built as of 1833, inaugurated in 1837.
The Galerie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie Comparée ('Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy'), a comparative anatomy museum in the ground floor and a paleontology museum in the first and second floors. The building was inaugurated in 1898.
The Galerie de Botanique ('Gallery of Botany'), inaugurated in 1935 thanks to funds provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, contains botany laboratories and the French Muséum's National Herbarium (the biggest in the world with a collection of almost 8 million samples of plants). The building also contains a small permanent exhibition about botany.
The botanical garden grows more than 10,000 species. It includes tropical greenhouses, a rose garden, a winter garden, as well as an Alpine garden. In addition to the gardens and the galleries, there is also a small zoo, the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, founded in 1795 by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre from animals of the Ménagerie Royale de Versailles, the menagerie at Versailles, which was dismantled during the French Revolution.
The Royal Garden of Medicinal Plants
The garden was formally founded in 1635 as the Royal Garden of Medicinal Plants by an edict of King Louis XIII. The garden was put under the authority of the Physician of the king, Guy de la Brosse. It was staffed by a group of "demonstrateurs", who lectured visitors, particularly future physicians and pharmacists, on botany, chemistry, and geology, illustrated by the garden collections.
In 1673, under Louis XIV, and his new royal physician and director of the Garden, Guy-Crescent Fagon, great-nephew of Guy de la Brosse, the garden was given a new amphitheater, where dissections and other medical courses were conducted. The lecturers included the celebrated physician and anatomist Claude Perrault, equally famous as the architect who designed the facade of the Louvre Palace.
In the early 18th century, the chateau was given an additional floor to house the royal botanist's medicinal plant collection. This section was gradually turned into galleries to display the royal collection of minerals. At the same time, the greenhouses on the west and south were enlarged, to hold the plants brought back to France by numerous scientific expeditions around the world. New plants were studied, dried, and cataloged. A group of artists made herbals, books with detailed illustrations of each new plant, and the plants of the collection were carefully studied for their possible medical or culinary uses. One example was the group of coffee plants brought from Java to Paris, which were raised and studied by Antoine de Jussieu for their possible medical and commercial use. His studies led to the plantation of coffee in the French colonies of North America.
The most celebrated head of the garden was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who served as its head from 1739 until his death in 1788. While director of the garden, he also owned and operated a large and successful iron works and foundry in Burgundy, but lived in the garden, in the house that now carries his name. Buffon doubled the size of the garden, expanding down to the banks of Seine. He enlarged the Cabinet of Natural History in the main building, and added a new gallery to the south. He also brought into the scientific community of the garden a team of important botanists and naturalists, including Jean Baptiste Lamarck, author of one of the earliest theories of evolution.
Sponsored by Buffon, explorers and botanists were sent to different corners of the world to collect specimens for the garden and museum. Michel Adanson was sent to Senegal, and the navigator La Perouse to the islands of the Pacific. They returned with shiploads of specimens, which were carefully studied and classified. This research caused a conflict between the scientists of the Royal Gardens and the professors of the Sorbonne over the question of evolution. The scientists, led by Buffon and his followers, claimed that natural species gradually evolved, while the theologians of the Sorbonne insisted that nature was exactly as it was at the time of the Creation. Since the scientists had the backing of the Royal court, they were able to continue their studies and publish their work.
The French Revolution and the 19th Century – The Menagerie
On June 7, 1793, in the course of the French Revolution, the new government, the National Convention, ordered a complete transformation of the former royal institutions. They created a new Museum of Arts and Techniques, transformed the Louvre from a royal residence to a museum of art, and combined the Royal Garden of Plants and the Cabinet of Natural Sciences into a single organization: the Museum of Natural History. It also received a number of important collections which had belonged to aristocrats, such as a famous group of wax models illustrating anatomy which had been created by André Pinson.
The Museum and gardens also benefited from Napoleon's 1798 French invasion of Egypt and Syria; the military force was accompanied by one hundred and fifty-four botanists, astronomers, archeologists, chemists, artists and other scholars, including Gaspard Monge, Joseph Fourier, and Claude Louis Berthollet. Drawings and paintings of their findings are in the collections of the Natural History Museum.
The holdings today include 6,963 specimens of the herbarium collection of Joseph Tournefort, donated on his death.