NARRATOR
So how did they relate to real life? And was she getting any closer to a possible owner? Perhaps a scientist or a medical man. One candidate stood out - Carolus Clusius, a famous botanist of the sixteenth century, and a professor at Leiden university in Holland.

CLAUDIA SWAN
Having seen the watercolours in Krakow I raced back to Leiden to answer a whole constellation of questions about the relationship between these works on paper and the actual practice of botany and more broadly medicine at Leiden, at the university, and specifically in the garden in the 1590s.


CARLA TEUNE
Leiden was a very young university, it started in 1575 and it was the first university in Holland. The Hortus Botanicus was part of the university, in fact it was part of the medical school of the university, and they needed plants in those days to teach medicine because plants were used for healing people.

NARRATOR
But before the university could create a garden they needed an expert and Carolus Clusius was an obvious choice - widely travelled and famous throughout Europe for his botanical knowledge.

CARLA TEUNE
He came here after a long and very busy life collecting plants, writing about them in books, translating other people's very famous people's books, and when the university started the garden they wanted to have a very famous person, you could say more or less a status symbol.


NARRATOR
Clusius arrived in Leiden in October 1593, and the botanical garden was finished within a year. Its rapid completion was thanks to the appointment of a local pharmacist called Dierk Klout as gardener, who came with an extensive personal plant collection.

The garden was a centre of learning, but also a place where botanical knowledge was being structured and ordered. The flowers remind us of recreational gardens, but here every plant had a place, and a purpose. In a Leiden archive an early plan of the garden shows exactly how it would have been laid out when Clusius was in charge.

PIETER BAAS
It was an extremely clever system with the garden being subdivided in a number of main rectangles, and I hope I can show this in this very first map which you see here. So we have four sectors here which are divided into four, and each of these segments was again divided into small beds. And each actual bed had a subdivision into ? and that is indicated here on the map. So twenty-four small plots.


CARLA TEUNE
The students came to this garden to learn the plants. They had to come here every day with the professor, and they had a little book with a folding map of the garden, of plants with all the little beds on it, and they had… on the right page of the book they had one bed and they wrote numbers. The professor said “This is a peony”, or whatever you want to have, and so they wrote: “Number one peony”, and on the opposite bed, “Number one peony. So they did the whole plant bed and finally when it was finished they had to learn it. And they went on to another plant bed.

NARRATOR
For students it was a formidable task. Hundreds of species had to be learnt by appearance at different times of the year. But where did Claudia’s paintings fit in? How did they relate to the real plants growing in the garden?

CLAUDIA SWAN
It’s clear walking through a Renaissance garden like this one how a set of watercolours of this scope would have functioned as a winter garden. So whereas in the spring, summer, and even the fall the contents of the actual garden were used for hands on study (observation of plants) particularly for their medicinal values, the water colours would have served as a winter garden insofar as they stood in for the contents of that garden in the winter months when the garden was dormant.

NARRATOR
One piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. The vast collection of watercolours that the great botanist Clusius was assumed to have brought to Leiden was a teaching tool - berries, blossom, leaves, and buds, all displayed on a single page to be memorised.

CLAUDIA SWAN
To encounter this kind of a collection of images, a winter garden, is to encounter a nexus of the worlds of art, and science, specifically Medicine.


NARRATOR
But medical students didn’t only study plants. Public dissections, at the university’s anatomical theatre would have revealed new secrets, peeling back the layers of the human body. No one knew how the body worked, let alone how to use internal surgery to cure illness. But anatomists could at least chart its mysterious regions.

NARRATOR
But medical students didn’t only study plants. Public dissections, at the university’s anatomical theatre would have revealed new secrets, peeling back the layers of the human body. No one knew how the body worked, let alone how to use internal surgery to cure illness. But anatomists could at least chart its mysterious regions.

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