European dried gardens from the 16th century have been traditionally associated with either the traditional genre of pharmacopeias or with the emergence of early modern botany. This paper reviews a sample of the 37 known exemplars of these bound collections of books, and argues that the design and development of these orti sicci or herbaria, as they were also known, reveal a broader set of questions on and about nature, and about the relationships of humans with the natural world. Based on the evidence of a diverse corpus of dried gardens (some richly bound, others composed over recycled paper, some with copious annotations, others with a seemingly random layout and distribution of plants, this paper argues for a comparative reading of these books as a corpus of early modern natural philosophy.
