Albert the Great’s De vegetabilibus represents the first complete treatise on the vegetal world in the medieval Latin West. Albert focuses on plant physiology, especially dealing with digestion, as he adapts the doctrine of human digestion to plants by describing every activity in them as due to a precise phase of digestion. Albert’s description of plants relies on digestion and nourishment as the body undergoes a continuous state of dissolution and growth.
In his text, Albert provides a detailed overview of every type of moisture and heat that operate within digestion. In this way, he explains the diverse phases of vegetal life, blooming and ripening. Accordingly, the generation of flowers is the first ebullition of the subtler part of moisture from which, therefore, derives the generation of fruits.
As a result, Albert presents an innovative interpretation of life. In my talk, while analysing Albert’s description of the generation of flowers and fruits and of the diversity of their accidents, like colours, forms, flavours and smells, I show that the generation of each part of a plant is conceived as a stage of the whole metabolic process. By assigning a complex metabolic process to plants in order to describe each of their activities, Albert’s innovative approach represents an important moment in the history of botany.

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.

In the Seventeenth century medicine, botany does not restrict to the uses of simples and the fabrication of therapeutics, but also to the analogy between plants and animals. The study of plants work in the explanation of some specific living conditions, operations, and organs. In this paper, I especially focus on three different cases that reveal a common goal: Jean Riolan, William Harvey, and Marcello Malpighi.
In Les Œuvres anatomiques, Riolan repeats Galen’s claim that the foetus lives in the same way of plants at the beginning of generation, i.e., when neither arteries, veins, pulse, brain, nor the heart are formed. Riolan demonstrates his position on the ground of anatomical studies on the formation of the veins and arteries, but also works on plants in order to describe generation and details about the different stages of life. In Exercitationes de generationem animalium, Harvey deals with the seeds of plants to exemplify several issues of his study of eggs. He also stresses that the early stage of the life of foetus corresponds to the life of a plant, therefore equating plastic virtue to the formative faculty. In Dissertatio epistolica De Formatione Pulli in ovo, Malpighi stresses a similarity between animal eggs and the seeds of plants, whose study he considers a means to enter the secrets of living bodies. He especially focuses on the movement of sap and on the movement of blood, and he compares the hydraulic mechanism of filtration of specific organs to the structure of plants.

Darwin’s idea of an evolutionary tree of life sprouted from this and other tree-sketches of his early notebooks (Notebook B, 1837), illustrating the way in which all species are connected by common descent. In On the Origin of the Species (1859), there is one “indispensable [illustration] to show the nature of the very complex affinities of past & present animals.” This illustration is a rather abstract shrub-like diagram that played a pivotal part in explaining his principle of “descent with modification by means of natural selection.” 
Darwin’s tree of life grew out into the single most important plant-metaphor in the natural sciences. Although tree-diagrams were not new to the natural sciences, Darwin’s evolutionary tree challenged an important doctrine of natural philosophy. When Darwin published the Origin, the Aristotelian order of nature still held sway over Western thinking. The natural order was still depicted as a linear ladder (scala naturae) or “chain of beings”, ranging from the “lower” life forms (plants) to the “highest” life forms (humans). Darwin too found it difficult to distance himself from a ladder-like conception of nature. To this day evolution is still often depicted as a linear progressive process from lower to higher life forms. During this talk we will look at the development of “tree-thinking” in Darwin’s work and how it supplanted his “ladder-thinking”.

In 1861 the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker published a devastating review of an expedition undertaken by his German rivals, the Brothers Schlagintweit, to India and Central Asia. “There is ... a suspicion abroad,” Dalton informed readers of the Athenaeum, “that the brothers’ appointment was one of the most gigantic jobs that ever disgraced the annals of science.” A variety of impulses drove Dalton’s criticism: personal jealousy, national rivalry, professional integrity, and the one that most historians identify, the decline of Humboldtian methods under the onslaught of Darwinian theory. My talk will propose an additional interpretation of this controversy, namely that Alexander von Humboldt’s lavish maps of vegetation never enjoyed quite the influence among botanists that their beauty might suggest. Much like Vesalius’s De Fabrica three centuries earlier, Humboldt’s images of the geographical distribution of plants at high altitude remained more of a monument to scientific illustration than a tool of working scientists.