ABSTRACT
Italy and the Botanical Renaissance By Clusius’s age Italy boasted a long horticultural tradition which went back, via the formal gardens of the Renaissance and the monastic gardens in which fruit, vegetables and medicinal plants were grown, to the pleasure and utility gardens of the ancient Romans. e early start and the long horticultural as well as academic and medicinal tradition should not, however, be taken to suggest that every single development of the Botanical Renaissance happened rst in Italy and only later, under Italian in uence, in the rest of Europe.
