The Birth of the Oxford Physic Garden and the Death of Common Plant Knowledge

In 1621 the University of Oxford founded the first experimental garden in England and set a Baconian curriculum of plant study that continued to shape English botany in its emergence as a scientific field after the Restoration. Initially funded by a soldier with money from his role in the recolonization of Ireland and built on top of a medieval Jewish cemetery, Oxford's Physic Garden was populated with specimens bioprospected from England's overseas encroachments and supported by men with deep ties to the Stuart Crown. From the start, the projects initiated out of this university site were invested in closing off botanical knowledge from all but a small number of naturalists (many with financial interests in colonial ventures) who shared a passion for discovering — or, more to the point, inventing — a national nature that was distinctive, legible, and transplantable to England's settlements across the globe.

My talk situates itself in a critical moment of this history of botanical nativism, when in the late 1660s and 1670s the early prints of the new Royal Society in London joined with those of Oxford's new University Press to introduce this garden to the national reading public. I pair the slew of literary and scientific prints emerging from these twinned publishers with notes and letters to show how the garden's overseers systematically excluded laypersons, Indigenous and enslaved experts, and women both physically (via walls, bylaws, and threats) and intellectually (via silencing, renaming, and theft) in order to cement a masculinist, elite community of virtuosi whose botanic knowledge was proprietary and inaccessible to the common lot.