What is a physic garden?

A physic garden is a cultivated space devoted to medicinal plants, known as "simples" because each acts alone, without mixing. Found in medieval monasteries, Chinese imperial courts, and the first universities, these gardens served as living reference collections for plant-based pharmacopoeia for centuries. They are the direct ancestors of modern botanical gardens.

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The Physic Garden: A Living Pharmacopoeia

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As early as the first episode, before her talent is even revealed at court, Maomao mentions that she makes a detour by the physic garden while delivering remedies. This seemingly minor detail immediately establishes her relationship with knowledge: she does not simply dispense ready-made preparations, she maintains a direct connection with the plants themselves. The physic garden is her field laboratory, the place where she observes, gathers, and verifies what she prepares.

The subject in depth

The word “simple” designates, in pre-modern pharmacological tradition, a medicinal plant used alone, without mixing: as opposed to compound preparations that combine several ingredients, a simple is the elementary building block of plant-based therapeutics ^[Wikipedia]. A physic garden is therefore, literally, the place where these building blocks are grown, observed, and harvested.

Plan of a physic garden laid out in squares, one square per plant, after the Saint Gall plan — The physic garden

The idea of gathering useful plants in one organized space is ancient and found across cultures. It answers a practical need: having on hand plants whose quality, stage of maturity, and identification are known with certainty. An apothecary who grows their own simples controls the entire chain, from seed to preparation, and does not depend on the approximations of trade.

This knowledge, accumulated plant by plant, gave rise to the great compendiums of pre-modern pharmacopoeia. The Chinese tradition formalized this body of knowledge in works such as the Shennong Bencao Jing, a materia medica compiled during the Han era, describing several hundred plants, minerals, and animal substances along with their properties and uses

^[Wikipedia]. In Europe, Dioscorides’ Materia Medica, written in the first century CE, played the same role for more than fifteen centuries. These texts were the reference works that apothecaries studied, annotated, and corrected through experience.

Growing simples requires precise knowledge of each plant: its growth cycle, the active part (root, leaf, flower, bark), the harvest season, the drying method. Some plants must be harvested at a precise stage for their active compounds to be concentrated. Others see their composition vary with sun exposure, soil quality, or altitude. What we would today call empirical knowledge of pharmacognosy was then passed down from master to apprentice, in the garden itself, by observing the living plants.

In real life

Physic gardens existed in every major medical tradition. In Europe, Benedictine monasteries were the most systematic keepers and transmitters of this knowledge from the early Middle Ages onward: the Plan of Saint Gall (9th century) includes a physic garden with sixteen named plots, each reserved for one plant. The first medical universities, such as Padua or Montpellier, created their own botanical gardens in the 15th and 16th centuries to teach medical botany directly from living plants rather than manuscript illustrations.

In China, the cultivation of officinal plants was organized at the level of the state: imperial medicinal-plant gardens supplied the court and the health administration. In the Middle East, the bimaristan (medieval Islamic hospitals) maintained their own gardens and pharmacopoeia libraries, extending and enriching the Greek legacy of Dioscorides. These parallel traditions show that the same need (reasoning through plants) produced comparable institutional solutions across three continents.

The modern botanical garden descends directly from the physic garden: the first ones, founded in Europe in the 16th century, explicitly aimed to organize the plant world for medical purposes. The break with plant-based pharmacopoeia only came in the 19th century, with synthetic chemistry, which made it possible to isolate active compounds and then produce them without the plant. Today, about 25% of commonly used medicines still derive from plant-based molecules.

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Published on May 30, 2026

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