What shaped the Brussels Botanical Garden (1826–1912)? Botany and its numerous competitors duetting or duelling?

Abstract

The Brussels Botanical Garden has always been a battlefield for various and sometimes unexpected forces. The main and very understandable reason for such a situation is that a scientific institution — as science itself — is only part of a global society. It plays a role in it and it develops under the pressures that its own milieu creates or undergoes, at a local, national or even at an international level. All in all a botanical garden reflects the world it was born in, its ‘Geist’, its political and philosophical struggles, its material conditions, not to mention the developments of science itself Botanical gardens still deserve in-depth studies that would validate — or invalidate — such a handful of commonplaces, and case studies would be gratefully greeted if they were to be written. But let us get back to the main question: what shaped the Brussels Botanical Garden, and how did the garden itself (the beds, the nurseries, etc.) reflect the evolving country? In Brussels it is safe to claim that science had some tough enemies to fight to ensure the creation of a modern botanical garden of which the country could be proud. Here are the factors that it had to come to terms with.