The Scientist - 03.2020

64 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com

FOUNDATIONS

NATURALIS BIODIVERSITY CENTER

BY ASHLEY YEAGER

A Smiling Garden, 1558

H

ere for you a smiling garden of

everlasting flowers. This sentence,

inscribed in Latin in the 16th-century

En Tibi herbarium, invites readers to enjoy

a book of roughly 500 dried plants that is

one of the oldest surviving botanical collec-

tions in the world. Bound in Italy during

the Renaissance, the book contains some of

the earliest herbarium records of oregano,

thyme, and hot pepper, and has contributed

to historians’ understanding of the origins

of botany even as the identity of its maker

remained a mystery for centuries.

“It’s like having a painting by Leonardo

da Vinci and not knowing that it’s he who

made it,” Anastasia Stefanaki, a botanist at

the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden,

the Netherlands, tells The Scientist. Hun-

dreds of years ago, Dutch scholar and man-

uscript collector Isaac Vossius got hold of

the En Tibi, and a year after his death in

1689, the book became part of Leiden Uni-

versity’s collection. To better understand the

historical and scientific context of the book,

a group of scholars recently asked Stefanaki,

an expert in Mediterranean plants, to

identify the specimens in the book. As she

reviewed the plants pressed within the her-

barium’s pages, she began to wonder if she

and her colleagues could determine the ori-

gin of the iconic collection.

At the time the book was made, scholars

recognized that apothecaries and physicians

were dispensing sometimes-dangerous

treatments based on the vague descriptions

and illustrations in repeatedly reproduced

editions of ancient herbal books. In an

attempt to standardize such treatments,

botanists started collecting, pressing, and

preserving medicinal plants, as well as many

others, in book pages. “That was a renais-

sance in botany that started in the sixteenth

century in Italy,” Stefanaki says. She and

her colleagues wanted to give credit to the

creator of the En Tibi and others who had

helped spark this revolution.

A professor of medical botany at the

University of Bologna, Luca Ghini, who

lived from 1490 until 1556, is considered

one of the founding fathers of the herbar-

ium, though no known examples of his

books of pressed plants have survived. Many

of Ghini’s students also created such books,

and historians have speculated that maybe

one of Ghini’s students was responsible for

the En Tibi.

Comparing the plant species in the book

with other famous herbaria from 16th-

century Italy, Stefanaki and her colleagues

found many similarities, and concluded

that the collection probably did come from

someone who been influenced by Ghini’s

teachings, possibly whoever created the

Erbario Cibo, another classic book of plants

from the time. Because the authorship of the

Erbario Cibo was also debated, attributed

either to Ghini’s student Gherardo Cibo or

to Francesco Petrollini, Ghini’s contempo-

ra r y, the team examined the handwriting in

that book and the En Tibi, along with writ-

ing samples from Cibo and Petrollini. The

analysis yielded hints that Petrollini cre-

ated both the En Tibi and the Erbario Cibo

(PLOS ONE, 14:e0217779, 2019).

“It seems to me that they have done

pretty careful detective work,” says Paula

Findlen, a professor of Italian history at

Stanford University who was not involved

in the work, calling the authors’ conclusion

“a really well-informed possibility.” g

PLANT PRESERVATION: The En Tibi herbarium, created in 16th-century Italy, is one of the oldest known collections

of dried plants. Along with species native to the Mediterranean, it features imports such as hot pepper (Capsicum

annuum, above right), then an exotic curiosity from the Americas that was cultivated in noblemen’s private gardens.

inscribed in Latin in the 16th-century

the Renaissance, the book contains some of

thyme, and hot pepper, and has contributed

the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden,

versity’s collection. To better understand the

a group of scholars recently asked Stefanaki,

PLANT PRESERVATION: The En Tibi herbarium, created in 16th-century Italy, is one of the oldest known collections