Qualla: Hortus Botanicus Leiden

Hortus Botanicus Leiden: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maarten from Netherlands, CC BY 2.0. Carolus Clusius arrived in Leiden in 1593 carrying tulip bulbs from the gardens of the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. He was sixty-six years old, lame from a bad fall on horseback, and famous across Europe for his botanical correspondence. He had been asked to take charge of a thirty-five-by-forty-meter patch of dirt behind the new University of Leiden, intended to teach medical students which plants would heal them and which would kill them. Within a few growing seasons, Clusius had filled the small rectangle with more than a thousand species. Among them, in tidy beds, sat the unfamiliar bulbs from Constantinople that would, within forty years, send a young Dutch republic into the first speculative bubble in modern history.

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Image: Maarten from Netherlands | CC BY 2.0

Hortus Botanicus Leiden: A Garden for the Medical Students

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roger Veringmeier, CC BY 4.0. In 1587, three years before any seed went into the ground, the young University of Leiden petitioned the mayor for a hortus academicus - an academic garden - behind its university building. The request sat in the city's pile of municipal business until 1590, when permission was f...

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Image: Roger Veringmeier | CC BY 4.0

Hortus Botanicus Leiden: Clusius and the Tulip

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Xsandriel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Clusius was an obsessive correspondent. From Leiden he wrote to gardeners in Constantinople, Antwerp, Vienna, and Salamanca, trading bulbs and seeds and the latest botanical gossip. The tulips he brought from his previous post in Vienna had themselves traveled west from the Ottom...

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Image: Xsandriel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hortus Botanicus Leiden: What the VOC Brought Home

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Xsandriel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Clusius leaned on the Dutch East India Company to send back specimens from every port they touched. His successors continued the practice. Herman Boerhaave, prefect from 1709 to 1730 and one of the most famous physicians in Europe, expanded the collection until visiting scholars ...

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Image: Xsandriel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hortus Botanicus Leiden: The Old Trees and the Tropical House

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Xsandriel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Some of the plants here are older than the Dutch Republic that funded them. A tuliptree planted in 1716 still stands; a ginkgo from 1785 still drops its yellow fan-shaped leaves every November. The Orangery, built between 1740 and 1744, is one of the oldest still-functioning gree...

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Image: Xsandriel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hortus Botanicus Leiden: An Oasis in the Old Town

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steven Lek, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walk in from the Rapenburg canal and the city falls away. The garden is laid out around the original university buildings, with a reconstruction of Clusius's 1594 plot opened in 2009 based on a surviving plant list. Pond herons stand still as statues in the long water; the Victor...

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Image: Steven Lek | CC BY-SA 4.0