Egyptian pharaohs planted exotic trees and cared for them; they brought ebony wood from the Sudan, and pine and cedar from Syria. Hatshepsut's expedition to Punt returned bearing thirty-one live frankincense trees, the roots of which were carefully kept in baskets for the duration of the voyage; this was the first recorded attempt to transplant foreign trees. It is reported that Hatshepsut had these trees planted in the courts of her Deir el Bahri mortuary temple complex.
Marco Polo describes how Kublai Khan collected specimens of evergreen trees that he admired from around the Mongol Empire in the late 13th century, and had them brought by elephant to his winter capital at Khanbaliq (modern Beijing), where they were planted on a large artificial mound, "a hundred paces in height and over a mile in cicumference", known as the "Green Mound", with a palace or pavilion at the top. The ground of the mound was also covered in pieces of green stone.
In an arboretum a wide variety of trees and shrubs are cultivated. Typically the individual trees are labelled for identification. The trees may also be organised in a way to aid their study or growth.
Many tree collections have been claimed as the first modern arboretum, with the term applied retrospectively as it probably did not come into use even orally until the later eighteenth century, or later. Probably the most important early proponent of the arboretum in the English-speaking transatlantic world was the prolific landscape gardener and writer, John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) who undertook many gardening commissions and published the Gardener's Magazine, Encyclopaedia of Gardening and other major works. Loudon's Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, 8 vols., (1838) is probably the most significant work on the subject in British history and included an account of all trees and shrubs that were hardy in the British climate, an international history of arboriculture, an assessment of the cultural, economic and industrial value of trees and four volumes of plates.