The
Worshipful Society of Apothecaries initially established the garden on a leased site of Sir
John Danvers' well-established garden in
Chelsea, London. This house, called Danvers House, adjoined the mansion that had once been the house of Sir
Thomas More. Danvers House was pulled down in 1696 to make room for Danvers Street. In 1713, Sir
Hans Sloane purchased from Charles Cheyne the adjacent Manor of
Chelsea, about , which he leased in 1722 to the Society of Apothecaries for
£5 a year in perpetuity, requiring in the Deed of Conveyance that the garden supply the
Royal Society, of which he was a principal, with 50 good
herbarium samples per year, up to a total of 2,000 plants. That initiated the golden age of the Chelsea Physic Garden under the direction of
Philip Miller (1722–1770), when it became the world's most richly stocked botanic garden. Its seed-exchange programme was established following a visit in 1682 from
Paul Hermann, a Dutch botanist connected with the
Hortus Botanicus Leiden and has lasted until the present day. The seed exchange programme's most notable act may have been the introduction of
cotton into
the colony of Georgia and more recently, the worldwide spread of the Madagascar periwinkle (
Catharanthus roseus).
Isaac Rand, a member and a fellow of the Royal Society, published a condensed catalogue of the garden in 1730,
Index plantarum officinalium, quas ad materiae medicae scientiam promovendam, in horto Chelseiano. Elizabeth Blackwell's A Curious Herbal (1737–1739) was illustrated partly from specimens taken from the Chelsea Physic Garden. In 1781, the collection of specimens was donated by the Royal Society to the British Museum in Bloomsbury, then moved in 1881 to the Department of Botany of the British Museum in Kensington, now the
Natural History Museum. The Trustees of the London Parochial Charities took over management of the garden in 1899 and for the majority of the twentieth century, it was used for scientific research and was not open to the public. In 1983, the garden became a charity and was run by a private board of trustees, and a few years later in 1987, it was open to the general public for the first time. In 2001 the then director Rosie Atkins led changes that improved the educational role of the garden. As of 2025, the chair of the trust that manages the Garden is Sarah Flannigan. Since 2014, the garden director is Sue Medway MBE. ==Current garden==