Cambridge experts recreate 336-year-old garden to commemorate ‘father of natural history’

John Ray, 17th-century botanist who coined words petal and pollen, was a tutor at Cambridge when he created his first garden

He coined the terms petal and pollen, helped to lay the foundations of modern biology and is widely regarded as the greatest English naturalist of the 17th century.

But it was while he was a young college tutor at Cambridge in the 1650s that the botanist John Ray - also known as the father of natural history" - created his first known garden and began to systematically study plants for the first time.