Botanic gardens are places where knowledge is gathered, preserved, imparted and experimented with. They are places of scientific practice and communication where architectural and aesthetic concepts have only a supportive role serving botanical experimentation as well as the presentation of plant systematics. Botanic gardens are conventionally regarded as encyclopaedias planted for reference and, consequently, as a balance against the fixed and theoretical knowledge available through herbaria and botanical literature. This volume includes most of the papers presented during our symposium entitled “Botanical Gardens within Global and Local Dynamics — Sociability, Professionalization and Diffusion of Knowledge” and has been completed with papers focusing particularly on design and science within botanic gardens. In putting botanic gardens in their scientific and social context, I hope that we can contribute with this set of papers to a better understanding of the identity of botanic gardens as scientific institutions within a global history of gardens.

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