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Throughout the middle ages the peoples of Europe believed that the original home of mankind had lain in a garden, where the climate was always mild and the trees flowered continuously. The Fall and the Expulsion were held responsible for the differences between the seasons, and for the disordered world which lay between the frozen wastes to the North and the scorching deserts to the South; for the need to toil in the fields, for pain, for sorrow, and for death. Nobody knew for certain whether the Garden of Eden had been swept away by the Flood, and it seems to have been generally assumed that an early paradise still existed. With the fifteenth-century voyages of exploration hopes ran high that the Garden might yet be rediscovered, and Columbus believed that he had identified its location in the New World. As the sixteenth century wore on, and no authentic Paradise was found, men began to think, instead, of searching the globe for the scattered pieces of the creation, and collecting them together in to Botanic Gardens. In this way the best hopes of mankind in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries came to rest, not in 'progress' or in some foreshadowing of the industrial revolution, but in the recovery of the original home, in a 'Garden of Re-Creation'. This book explores the development of the Botanic Garden in Europe in the light of this view of the world and shows how the famous early gardens in Paris, Oxford, Padua, Leyden and Uppsala sought to re-create the Garden of Eden.