During the redesign of his residence at Willibaldsburg Castle above the Altmühl Valley in the early 17th century, the Prince-Bishop of Eichstätt, Johann Konrad von Gemmingen (1561–1612), had a magnificent pleasure garden created by the Nuremberg apothecary, botanist, and publisher Basilius Besler (1561–1629). To preserve the garden and its treasures for posterity, he commissioned Besler to document the plants, arranged by season, in written descriptions and copperplate engravings.

The result of this work was the Hortus Eystettensis, printed in Nuremberg in 1613: a sumptuous three-volume catalog featuring 367 hand-colored botanical illustrations and detailed descriptions covering 90 plant families and 340 genera, many of them of exotic origin. Unique in its time, the work reflects not only the extraordinary biodiversity of the Eichstätt garden. Its refined, elegant mode of depiction also reveals a new approach: viewing the plant world from an aesthetic perspective, rather than solely through the practical, medicinal lens that had previously dominated. Written before the rise of modern botanical taxonomy, the Hortus Eystettensis was nevertheless praised by Carl Linnaeus as “incomparable.”

Besler’s plant catalog endured far longer than the Eichstätt garden itself, which was devastated by Swedish troops in 1643 during the Thirty Years’ War. After many years of preparation, and not least on the basis of this baroque botanical classic, a successor site, the Eichstätt Bastion Garden, opened in 1998 on the historic grounds, bringing together many of the plants depicted in the Hortus Eystettensis.

The high-quality reproductions in this facsimile edition, made from an original copy held by the University Library of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, are expertly explained, as are the plants shown, from botanical, medicinal, and symbolic perspectives. An appendix with extensive texts on the historical significance of the Eichstätt garden and the Hortus Eystettensis completes the volume.

This edition of the Hortus Eystettensis (whose extremely rare original printings now trade in the millions) documents a milestone in botanical science and the art of illustration, and, very much in the spirit of its author Basilius Besler, makes the treasures of the Eichstätt garden accessible to a wider public.