Hortus Botanicus: The Coffee Plant That Crossed the World
Why is it significant?
Behind the railings on the corner of the Plantage Middenlaan you can see glasshouses, palms and old trees: the Hortus Botanicus, one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world. After the Names Memorial it can feel strange to step into a garden.
Key Facts
| Place | Hortus Botanicus: The Coffee Plant That Crossed the World |
|---|---|
| Address | Plantage Middenlaan 2a, 1018 DD Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.36680, 4.90780 |
| Part of Walk | Mokum's Lost Quarter: The Jewish Heart of Amsterdam and the Plantage |
| Generated | Generated |
Behind the railings on the corner of the Plantage Middenlaan you can see glasshouses, palms and old trees: the Hortus Botanicus, one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world. After the Names Memorial it can feel strange to step into a garden. But the Plantage was always the place where Amsterdam came to breathe.
The Hortus was founded in 1638 as a garden of medicinal herbs, at a time when plague kept returning to the city and doctors and apothecaries needed living plants to make their remedies. In 1682 it moved here, to the newly laid-out Plantage, and the ships of the East and West India Companies began to bring it specimens from every corner of their trading world.
The most famous of them was a coffee plant. Around the start of the eighteenth century a coffee plant arrived here from Java, and it thrived in the greenhouse. In 1714 the city of Amsterdam presented one of its offspring to King Louis the Fourteenth of France. From the royal garden in Paris, so the story goes, a seedling travelled to the Caribbean island of Martinique, and from there coffee spread across the Americas. Historians argue about the details, but the Hortus likes to claim that a great deal of the world's coffee has its roots right here.
The garden still holds extraordinary survivors, including a South African cycad believed to be several centuries old, often called one of the oldest potted plants in the world. And notice the neighbourhood around you. In the nineteenth century the Plantage, once a district of pleasure gardens, filled with elegant homes, and many prosperous Jewish families moved here from the crowded old quarter.
That is why the war came to these quiet, leafy streets as well. Cross the Plantage Middenlaan to the small park with tall trees and a gate on the canal side, the Wertheimpark.