A NATURAL HISTORY OF ENGLISH GARDENING, 1650-1800 MARK LAIRD

摘要

The idea of the garden as a laboratory is not new: from the mid-sixteenth century, the physic garden aided medical research; in the second half of the eighteenth century, Gilbert White's record-keeping at Selborne, Hampshire, established a model for relating meteorological data to biological data. Yet climate change has made research undertaken in the controlled growing conditions of the botanic garden more relevant than ever as a kind of laboratory work. Richard Primack and Abraham Miller-Rushing recently argue in New Phytologist that botanic gardens "have a unique set of resources": first, to "identify which species will thrive under changing climate conditions and which may be conservation priorities, among the most pressing climate-related questions in ecology;" and second, to "improve our predictions of how various species will respond to future climate change." Ecologies may come to rely on this work.