Provenance
Sources
Every figure and name on this site comes from one of the sources below. It is fetched when someone asks for it and kept for between a day and a month, depending on how often the source itself changes. The old texts behind the physic garden are listed separately, with links to the manuscripts themselves.
Data
ISRIC — World Soil Information
SoilGrids 2.0
Modelled soil organic carbon stock and topsoil carbon content for any point on land, at 250m resolution.
soilgrids.orgGBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Occurrence API
Records of fungi and plants actually observed and recorded near a location, drawn from museums, herbaria and citizen science.
www.gbif.orgGloBI — Global Biotic Interactions
Species interaction records
Documented relationships between species: which fungi partner with which trees, and which feed on what.
www.globalbioticinteractions.orgEMBL-EBI
MGnify metagenomics resource
Soil and marine microbiome sequencing data underlying claims about below-ground diversity.
www.ebi.ac.uk/metagenomicsSPUN — Society for the Protection of Underground Networks
Underground mycorrhizal network mapping
The published research and global maps behind the fungal-network sections. SPUN publishes findings and maps; it has no public data API, so nothing here is fetched from it live.
www.spun.earthGBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility
GBIF Backbone Taxonomy
The accepted names, classification and common names behind every plant page, and the occurrence counts that order the plant search.
www.gbif.org/dataset/d7dddbf4-2cf0-4f39-9b2a-bb099caae36cWikimedia Foundation
Wikidata
The link from a GBIF species key (property P846) to the Wikipedia article about that species.
www.wikidata.orgWikimedia Foundation
Wikipedia, English and Dutch
The short summary on a plant page, quoted with a link to the full article, under CC BY-SA 4.0.
www.wikipedia.orgWikimedia Commons
Media repository
Botanical plates for the physic garden and photographs for plant pages, each credited with the licence recorded on its own file page.
commons.wikimedia.orgiNaturalist
Observations shared through GBIF
A photograph for a plant page that has no Commons image, limited to CC0 and CC BY 4.0 and credited to the observer.
www.inaturalist.orgOpenStreetMap contributors
Nominatim geocoding
Turning a typed place name into the coordinates used for every lookup on this site.
www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
The texts behind the physic garden
The manuscripts
- The Lorsch Pharmacopoeia
Written at Lorsch Abbey around 795 and now held in the Vatican Library as Pal. lat. 1361. It is the founding document of monastic medicine in western Europe, and it opens with an argument that treating the sick is a Christian duty rather than a worldly distraction. Digitised in full by Heidelberg University.
https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/bav_pal_lat_1361
- Hortulus — Walahfrid Strabo
A poem of about 444 lines, written around 840 by the abbot of Reichenau, describing the plants of his own garden one by one. It is the earliest first-hand account of a European garden by the person who kept it. This 1908 edition is digitised at the Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/HortulusWalafridiStrabi
- The Plan of St Gall
Drawn around 820 to 830, the only surviving architectural plan from the early Middle Ages. It shows an ideal monastery, and among its buildings a herbularius — a physic garden of sixteen named beds beside the infirmary. The word this site is named after comes from that drawing.
https://www.stgallplan.org/
Pointers and data
- Capitulare de villis
A capitulary issued under Charlemagne around 795 governing the running of royal estates. Its final chapter lists roughly ninety plants to be grown on every one of them, which makes it the closest thing the period has to a standard planting list. Linked here as an encyclopaedia entry, which carries references to the scholarly editions.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitulare_de_villis
- Wikimedia Commons — botanical plates
Every plate on this site is fetched from Commons, with the licence and artist read from the file's own record rather than assumed. Most come from Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen (1887); where they do not, the page says so.
https://commons.wikimedia.org
- GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Where each plant is recorded growing now, from museum, herbarium and citizen-science records. It is the one live measurement on this site, and the thread that ties it to its sister project, EcoSphere.
https://www.gbif.org
- European Medicines Agency — herbal medicinal products
Several of these plants are the subject of formal EU herbal monographs. This site does not summarise them, because summarising a monograph is the point at which a history page becomes a health claim. If that is what you came for, the Agency publishes it directly.
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory-overview/herbal-medicinal-products
What this site does not do
It was designed against a longer list of sources than it uses. When each was actually called, several could not be reached without credentials, approval or a licence: Kew’s Plants of the World Online and the IUCN Red List both refused anonymous requests, the Copernicus Climate Data Store endpoint in the plan no longer exists, and SPUN and IBAT publish maps and reports rather than a queryable API.
Rather than fill those gaps with plausible-looking estimates, they are simply absent. An invented number in a scientific frame is worse than a missing one: it cannot be checked, and it looks exactly like the real thing.
Limits worth knowing
- Soil figures are modelled, not sampled. SoilGrids predicts values for 250-metre squares from surveys taken elsewhere. Your own field can differ substantially from its square.
- Occurrence records measure effort as much as nature. A town with an active naturalists' society looks richer than a remote valley nobody visits.
- None of this is advice. It is a reading of public data, offered so people can see what is under the ground where they live.
What this site refuses to do
It will not tell you what to take for anything. Not a plant, not a preparation, not a quantity, not a condition. That refusal is not timidity: a page that says a plant helps with an ailment is making a health claim, and in the European Union a health claim is either authorised and evidenced or it is unlawful — and, far more importantly, several of the plants in this garden can seriously injure someone who acts on a twelve-hundred-year-old sentence.
What it will do is tell you exactly what a monk at Reichenau wrote down in about 840, and what is known now about the plant he was writing about. Those are two different kinds of statement, and this site never lets them wear the same clothes.