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Construction
Construction of Jardin des plantes
urban park in Paris, France
- 1635
- Europe
Construction
urban park in Paris, France
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
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, and formerly as the Jardin du Roi, 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 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 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.
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.
The major addition to the garden in the late 18th century was the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes. It was proposed in 1792 by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the intendant of the gardens, in large part to rescue the animals of the royal menagerie at the Palace of Versailles, who had been largely abandoned during the Revolution. The Duke of Orleans had a similar private zoo, also abandoned. At the same time the government of the Convention ordered the seizure of all the animals put on public display by various circuses in Paris. In 1795, the government acquired the Hôtel de Magné, the large estate of a French nobleman next to the gardens, and installed the large cages that had housed the animals at Versailles. The menagerie went through a very difficult early period, when the majority of the animals died, before it was given sufficient funding and more suitable structures by Napoleon. It became the home of animals brought back to France in scientific expeditions in the early 19th century, including a famous giraffe given to King Charles X by the Sultan of Cairo in 1827.
On 25 August 1944, Allied American troops (2nd DB) were stationed here for the night after the Liberation of Paris from Nazi Germany.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, the primary mission of the gardens and museums was research. Working in the laboratories there, the chemist Eugene Chevreul first isolated fatty acids and cholesterol, and studied the chemistry of vegetal dyes. The physiologist Claude Bernard studied the functions of the glycogen in the liver. In 1896, the physicist Henri Becquerel, working in a laboratory in the museum, discovered radioactivity. He wrapped uranium salts together with an unexposed photographic plate wrapped in black cloth, to keep out the sunlight. When he unwrapped them, the photographic plate had changed color from exposure to the radiation. He received the Nobel Prize in 1903 for his discovery.
The Gallery of Paleontology and of Comparative Anatomy was opened in 1898, replacing structures built between 1795 and 1807, to contain and display the thousands of skeletons the museum had collected. The menagerie buildings were also expanded, with the construction of an immense Bird House, by architect Jules André, 12 meters (39 ft) high, 37 meters (121 ft) long and 25 meters (82 ft) long,
The appearance of the gardens changed in the late 19th and early 20th century with the construction of new buildings. In 1877, the gallery of zoology, the landmark building that overlooks the formal garden, designed by Jules André, was begun. It was built to contain the immense zoological collections of the museum; the central hall is a landmark of iron construction, comparable to the Grand Palais and the Musée d'Orsay. It was inaugurated in 1888, but thereafter suffered from a long lack of maintenance and was closed in 1965. In the 1980s, a new home was found for the museum's gigantic collections. The Zoothêque, was constructed between 1980 and 1986 underneath the Esplanade Milne-Edwards, directly in front of the Gallery of Zoology. It is accessible only to researchers, and contains the thirty million specimens of insects, five hundred thousand fish and reptiles, one hundred fifty thousand birds, and seven thousand other animals. The building above underwent a major renovation from 1991 to 1994, to house the updated Grand Gallery of Evolution.
The National Museum of Natural History has been called "the Louvre of the Natural Sciences". It is contained in five buildings laid out along the formal garden; the Gallery of Evolution; the Gallery of Mineralogy and Geology; the Gallery of Botany; the Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy; and the Laboratory of Entomology.
The Grand Gallery of Evolution was designed by Jules André, whose other works in Paris included, in collaboration with Henri Labrouste, the Beaux-arts Bibliotheque National. He became architect of the museum in 1867, and his works are found throughout the Jardin des Plantes. It opened during the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, though it was not finished as intended; it still lacks a grand facade on the side of rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. The main facade, facing the two principal alleys of the formal garden, is flanked by two lantern towers. A series of medallions between the bays on the main facade overlooking the garden honors ten of the notable scientists who have worked in the Museum along with an allegorical statue of a woman holding an open book of knowledge.
While the exterior is Beaux-Arts architecture, the interior iron structure was entirely modern, contemporary with the Grand Palais and the new railroad station of the gare d'Orsay (now the Musée d'Orsay). It encloses a rectangular hall 55 meters long, 25 meters wide and 15 meters high, with the glass roof of one thousand square meters supported by rows of slender iron columns. The structure deteriorated, had to be closed in 1965, then underwent extensive restoration between 1991 and 1995. It now presents, through preserved animals and media displays, the evolution of species. It gives special attention to species that have disappeared or are endangered. The collection of preserved animals includes the rhinoceros brought to France in the 18th century by Louis XV.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Jardin des Plantes”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.