Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid

The beds behind the iron railings form a living collection, while the service buildings hold seeds, the herbarium, dried plants, books, and drawings. Here, future specialists were taught to distinguish one species from another, people determined which plants could be used for treatment, and examined arrivals from expeditions. The garden staff still maintain the collections, safeguard the archive, and study plants and fungi.

The word “royal” here refers to the institution's origins. In seventeen fifty-five, King Ferdinand VI ordered a school of botany to be opened in Madrid, with a garden for educational and medicinal plants. The first site was beside the Manzanares, far from students and the public. Charles III ordered the collections moved to their present location, next to the Cabinet of Natural History then under construction. In seventeen eighty-one, the garden opened on the Paseo del Prado.

Plants were placed behind the railings, while dried specimens, books, and drawings were kept in the service buildings. Here, people learned to distinguish species, tested medicinal properties, and examined materials from expeditions. The staff still do this today: they preserve living collections, seeds, the herbarium, and the archive, and study plants and fungi.

The most valuable part of the archive is connected with José Celestino Mutis, leader of the botanical expedition in New Granada, a Spanish possession in what is now Colombia. Mutis wanted to describe the local flora and send the results to the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid. He himself hardly drew at all. In Mariquita, and later in Santa Fe de Bogotá, Mutis assembled a workshop of more than thirty local artists. They worked from fresh plants, placing leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, and structural details on a single sheet. The result was an image of an entire species, not a portrait of one plucked specimen.

After Mutis's death, his students were unable to preserve the scientific center they had created. During the war for New Granada's independence, the Spanish general Pablo Morillo occupied Santa Fe and, in eighteen sixteen, sent the expedition's materials to Madrid as war booty. The drawings were transferred to this garden. They were inventoried here, but publication of the complete flora Mutis had envisioned stretched across generations.

In nineteen thirty-seven, the collections once again had to be evacuated. Madrid was under bombardment, and shells also struck the Botanical Garden. Its director at the time was José Cuatrecasas, a specialist in tropical flora responsible for preserving the archive. Under his leadership, the staff counted forty-two folders and one bound volume of Mutis's drawings, packed the sheets into seven wooden crates, and handed them over to the service saving cultural property.

The crates were taken out of Madrid together with the Prado's artworks. They passed through Valencia and Barcelona, then ended up in Geneva. After the war ended, Cuatrecasas left with his family for Colombia and supported himself by teaching at the National University of Colombia. He never returned to the directorship in Madrid.

In June nineteen thirty-nine, all seven crates were delivered back to the Botanical Garden. Its archive now holds more than six thousand six hundred drawings from Mutis's expedition—the very sheets that Cuatrecasas and his staff carried out of here under bombardment.