medicinal value. The collection included a good alpine collection and there were ‘stoves’ for two glasshouses on the north wall of the Garden. The Garden was unshaded and open to the south. A branch of Hobson’s Conduit entered the Garden feeding a ‘frog pond’ and a large double pond at the Garden’s centre. The long beds of herbs ran ‘in the Dutch style’ parallel to the main central path. There were few shrubs and trees. In 1763, with a new found enthusiasm for the Linnaean system, Thomas Martyn published the Plantae Cantabrigiensis in which all the known county flora was listed. He used John Ray’s early names and common names but introduced the new Linnaean names for the first time. Later James Donn, the second Garden Curator, published a full Garden plant list, the Hortus Cantabrigiensis. A contemporary reviewer describes it as a ‘little catalogue... intended for the use of those students in botany who shall be disposed to inspect the productions of the Walkerian Garden. From it they may immediately learn what plants they may have an opportunity of finding there, and what is yet required to render the collection more worthy of their notice’. This list of plants was laid out with reference to whether each was ‘medicinal, annual, biennial or perennial’. There was a clear intention to use the whole Garden for broadening the student’s knowledge and indeed the appreciation of plants by others in the University and their visitors. The aquatint by W Westall published by Ackermann in 1815 gives us a snapshot of this Garden’s appearance. It undoubtedly served also as a small park in the town
Tanacetum parthenium, Feverfew, would have been cultivated in the Old Botanic Garden as a medecinal plant. centre, even after the Botanic Garden moved to today’s site. On one noteworthy occasion in 1861, 2,300 visitors came to watch the celebrated tightrope walker, Charles Blondin perform. With the rope attached 45 feet up at one end to a huge Japanese acacia tree, he did several tricks including carrying a man across, walking across unsighted and pushing a wheelbarrow. John Henslow, who in 1825 had succeeded Thomas Martyn to the Chair of Botany, negotiated to move the Garden from its soot-polluted location to a larger rural setting. Before his pupil Charles Darwin had finished his Cambridge studies, Henslow had secured the present Botanic Garden site. From 1833 University teaching buildings (the ‘Museums’ of anatomy, physic, botany, chemistry and applied
mechanics) were gradually put up in the old Garden. The plant collection was added to greatly during the 1840s and bit by bit transferred to the new Botanic Garden, which finally opened on ‘the London Road site’ in 1846. Much natural science has been born in the buildings where the first Cambridge Garden came to its short-lived end. The Walkerian Garden site has thus doubly contributed to the heritage of plant evolution that we hold today. Next time you take a short cut down Free School Lane ponder this serendipitous fact: DNA revealed its structure to science in 1953 in Room 103 of the Austin Wing of the Cavendish Laboratories, on the same spot where over a century earlier Darwin and Henslow would have walked and talked about plants in our first Garden.
Garden Gates: comings and goings, a birds-eye view from Judy Cheney, PlantNetwork Administrator My office for PlantNetwork is on the fifth floor of the Austin Building, built in 1939 on the footprint of an earlier building for Botany in the New Museums Site. From my window, I can see King’s College Chapel and the towers of St Benet’s Church and Great St Mary’s, as in the Westall aquatint, left. I’ve been trying to work out where the features of the old Garden were on the site as it is today. I’ve looked at a range of maps and drawings from 1574 onwards and associated information, but there is more I need to look at before compiling a fuller account with dates and references. I’ve been thrilled to find that my office is on the site of the old Botanic Garden, probably where the stove house was or just in front of it. Here I report briefly on part of what I’ve found out about entrances and exits to the old and new Botanic Gardens in Cambridge.
There were several entrances to the Old Botanic Garden. The site given to the University by Richard Walker in 1762 included the ‘Great House’ facing Free School Lane and the ground in front of it. This was part of the former Augustinian Friary, and it was here that Thomas Martyn began his course of Lectures in Botany in April 1763. But by 1783, the building was in a ruinous state and was sold to John Mortlock (his bank in Bene’t Street eventually became Barclays Bank), with the ground in front of it, all except for a house occupied by John Salton, ‘the Gardener of the Botanic Garden’, and a passage 16-feet wide leading from Free School Lane to the Botanic Garden. The entrance to the passage was through a small ‘Renaissance’ archway in Free School Lane, opposite the gate in the railings around St Benet’s churchyard (a little further north than the
present archway into the New Museums Site). What was later referred to as the Curator’s House was on the right of this passage at the east end, where I think the path then turned right into the Garden. In 1874, the Cavendish Laboratory was built over the site of this passage and house, and the stone archway was moved and incorporated into the new building, but in a different orientation (facing approximately north), where it still is today. In 1763, the Botanic Garden site was still open on the south side, but a few years later (probably about 1765) handsome wrought-iron gates were erected in what is now Pembroke Street/Downing Street. The gates were set between stone piers with a high semicircular brick wall on either side – forming a forecourt on the outside, where, perhaps, carriages might have drawn in. Friends’ News – Issue 89 – May 2012