Hortus Botanicus

Start at the gate. Two brick pillars stand either side of it, each with a vase on top and a shield on its face: the old arms of Amsterdam and the new. The gate dates from the early 1700s. The garden behind it is older.

The city founded it in 1638 as a garden of medicinal herbs. Plants were the medicines of the day. Doctors and apothecaries came to study them, and apothecaries sat their exams in the garden. In 1682 the city council gave it this plot in the Plantage, and it has not moved since.

Then the ships came in. The Dutch East India Company brought plants home from the Cape, the geranium among them. In 1706 came coffee, grown by the Company at Batavia, now Jakarta. It did well under glass here. A few years later some young plants went to the king of France as a gift. The French took their offspring to their colonies in the Americas, and from there coffee reached Brazil. By the garden’s own tradition, the coffee of South America goes back to a plant grown on this spot.

“By the garden’s own tradition, the coffee of South America goes back to a plant grown on this spot.”

One of its oldest plants lives in the palm house, the brick and glass building with the round roof. It is a cycad from South Africa, a palm-like plant in a tub, and it came to the Netherlands more than three hundred years ago. The palm house itself went up in 1912, to keep the garden’s famous professor, Hugo de Vries, from leaving for America.

In 1986 the university that owned the garden let it go, and it nearly closed. Neighbours and students founded a society of friends and saved it. The huge modern glasshouse followed in 1993, with a jungle, a desert and a piece of South Africa under one roof. From the bridge over the canal you can see it without a ticket: a jungle in a glass box, in a garden that began with herbs for apothecaries.