The Power of Plants: The University of Oxford Botanical Garden

The University of Oxford Botanic Garden holds a scholarly collection of plants. It has been around since 1621, originally a Physic Garden (for medicinal plants). In the 19^th century, it became botanical (for any utility). It is a center of tranquility in the middle of High Street, right by the river. The wind blows less strongly inside the walls, and beyond its academic and artistic value, is a nice place to sit in the sun watching punters pass.

Not many people appreciate that medicine would be nowhere today if it weren’t for plants. The Botanic Garden still grows medicinal species. They have “The Healing Power of Plants Trail” which includes the key foxglove (heart conditions), mulberry (diabetes), and sweet corn (for pill capsules). The trail invites the visitor to imagine the diabetes pill, the cancer drug, and caffeine outside the capsule. It is a commemoration to a time when the things stuff was made out of was not a mystery. Nowadays, it is usually impossible to understand how something like our medicine is manufactured: rest assured it doesn’t grow like a plant anymore.

Composed of two courtyards, the Botanic Garden has patches bursting with flowers, grasses, and trees. Beside each patch of flora are descriptive plaques. About an eighth of one of the courtyards is taken up by the medicinal plants. Each field of medicine has a patch. As a pre-medical student, it was refreshing to encounter drug derivatives in their non-textbook form. The subtle clusters of the dark green mandrake, used to treat dysentery, or the conical white flower bundles of the Woolly Foxglove, for the treatment of severe heart conditions, puts me in contemplative bliss. The Botanic Garden is a monumental display of the importance of natural things, in all their simple beauty.

In a series of glass houses, are an alpine room, a fernery, a lily house, an insectivorous house, a palm house, and an arid house. These rooms are all carefully rendered little areas. The fernery’s floor is spiraling stone, the ferns copse around, clustering out to brush passersby. The lily house dangles teal colored vines and lilies the size of inflatable swimming pools. The arid house is desiccated by prickly cacti. A tree from India bulges with football-sized oranges, another’s no bigger than a marble. It is a floral emporium, token organisms plucked from every colony and buried into the Queen’s soil, but with rainbow glittering results in this university setting.

The Botanic Gardens immerse the visitor into a mini-microcosm trove of natural science diversity. It is more than just sun, a river, rocks, and plants; it resounds with the cry that Penicillin was first a plant.