A medieval garden of a special type was the herbarius, that is, the herb or medicinal plant garden, where plants used for therapeutic purposes were cultivated. Although archeological and documentary evidence for this type of garden is rather scant, some information can be obtained from archives, literary sources, and architectural plans. For instance, the Capitulare de villis promulgated sometime around the end of the eight century CE in the Carolingian world – either by or for Charlemagne (747–814) or Louis the Pious (778–840) – lists the plants, including medicinal species, to be grown in the gardens of the domains of the crown. The poem Liber de cultura hortorum, most known under the title Hortulus, written by Walahfrid Strabo (808 or 809–849) describes the plants in a garden that might be that of the Abbey of Reichenau in Germany. Similarly, the early ninth-century plan of Saint Gall Abbey in Switzerland shows the location of the medicinal plant garden within the monumental complex, and gives the names of the species in the several beds. However instructive these and other sources might be, they only offer some insights on a limited number of cases, leaving many others in the dark.

The most striking lacuna is probably about the garden of the pre-eminent medical center of Europe between the rise of the Arabic world and the creation of universities, that is, Salerno. The first medicinal gardens for which satisfactory evidence and documentation are available date back to the Renaissance. These are the gardens of Pisa and Padua, followed shortly by such others as Montpellier and Leiden. Eastern Mediterranean gardens for medicinal plants are not better known, especially in Byzantium.10 The ephemeral nature of such human constructions, the fragility of related documentation, and the alternating fates of history have cancelled many traces, and sometimes even the record of such gardens, so that an enquiry on them seems to be doomed from its very inception.

In this essay, I wish to approach the topic of Byzantine herb gardens on the basis of Greek, viz. Byzantine, pharmacological literature. I will first suggest that such literature probably reflects the practice of therapeutics and, hence, of medicinal plant collection and cultivation.