This essay discusses ways of thinking about botanic gardens that pay close attention to their particularity as designed spaces, dependent on technique, that nonetheless purport to present (and preserve) natural entities (plants). I introduce an account of what gardens are, how botanic gardens differ from other gardens, and how this particular form of garden arose in history. After this I contrast three ways of understanding the function of botanic gardens in the present (...) time: as sites of recreation, of conservation or of encounter with nature. Finally I develop the idea that these gardens may serve as archetypes of collaboration with nature. I conclude that, in principle, botanic gardens can model alternative, creative new ways for human beings to relate to the natural environment. (shrink)

Spanish naturalists established the Viceregal Botanical Garden of New Spain in Mexico City in 1788 to advance agriculture, manufacturing, and medicine. This colonial institution also served the ideological role of cultivating agents of empire. Rather than establish the garden in the already robust tradition of American botany, the Spanish appropriated this space, employing Creole students and servant workers to Europeanize local botanical knowledge through taxonomic colonialism. The different agendas at work in the botanical garden, which straddled the colonial and revolutionary (...) periods in Mexico, destabilized not only this institution, but also the empire itself from the ground up. That the contributions of the agents of the garden have been forgotten is evidence of the fragility and failure of a European institution in the American colonial state. (shrink)

Often overlooked by historians, specialist gardeners with an expert understanding of both native and exotic plant material were central to the teaching and research activities of university botanic gardens. In this article various interrelationships in the late Georgian period will be examined: between the gardener, the garden, the botanic collection, the medical school and ways of knowing. Foregrounding gardeners’ narratives will shed light on the ways in which botanic material was gathered and utilized for teaching and (...) research purposes, particularly for medical students, as well as highlighting the importance of the garden as a repository of botanic material for the classroom. In this way, the blurred lines between art and science, skill and scholarly activity, and shared pedagogic practices between botany and anatomy will be revealed. (shrink)

In 1980 grey-headed flying-foxes, a species now listed as "vulnerable to extinction," made camp at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne (RBGM). In May 2000 the RBGM started to kill bats. The killing was halted when Humane Society International (HSI) filed for the bats’ protection under federal and state conservation laws. Over the next 13 months, conservationists, garden officials and scientists, politicians, animal activists, and others all played a part in a chain of events that demonstrates the tangled web (...) of scientific involvement in politics and how different views within the scientific community may lead to conflicting positions on conservation strategies. (shrink)

This essay examines the aims, labor regime, and workers of the St. Vincent botanic garden to highlight differences in the infrastructure of government‐funded botany across the British empire. It argues that slavery was a foundational element of society and natural history in the Anglo‐Caribbean, and the St. Vincent botanic garden was both put into the service of slavery and transformed by it. When viewed from the Caribbean context and the perspective of enslaved workers, the St. Vincent garden's affiliation (...) with imperial improvement becomes less salient than its support of the status quo of slavery as a system and labor regime. The garden was dependent on enslaved laborers, yet the conditions of work and contemporary prejudices led superintendents to see them as undifferentiated labor. The politics of the archive make it impossible for historians to reconstruct the experiences of the garden's enslaved workers as individuals, including the specific labor that they performed or skills that they possessed. Plantation slavery's appropriation of and influence on the infrastructure of colonial botany through the St. Vincent botanic garden suggests that historians should center the local logics of the societies where scientific knowledge making took place to reveal the many meanings of science. (shrink)

In the early modern period, botany still remained a relatively new arrival at the top table of knowledge. Much botanical work was not done in universities, colleges, academies, laboratories, or botanic gardens, but behind the walls of different kinds of gardens – of the royalty as well as of common people, of monasteries as well as public gardens. By following the circula­tion of oranges, especially taking into consideration the role of Portugal as a turn­table, this paper (...) sheds light on several of the unexpected ways in which the history of botany and horticulture and the history of gardens encountered in the early modern world. The history of oranges has often made reference to the acclimatization of this citrus fruit in Europe and its transplantation to the New World. However, very few works have addressed the dissemination of oranges from the Iberian Peninsula. In this paper, I argue for a change in perspective by stressing the role played by the Portuguese on acclimatization and dissemination of oranges from Asia to Portugal, and from this country to the Old and New Worlds. I also stress the role Portugal played in building and popularizing horticultural expertise for orange growth and its corresponding botanical knowledge. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Aztecs and Their Kings Nezahualcoyotl: Renaissance Man of Aztec Culture The Uses of Nezahualcoyotl: Bridging Spanish and Aztec Cultures Nezahualcoyotl's Place, and the Place of Gardens, in Aztec Political History Texcotzingo Notes.

This stunning paperback volume showcases the winners and best entries for the International Garden Photographer of the Year competition and accompanies a major exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in May 2011 and touring the UK and USA thereafter. ‘The contemporary camera maybe a technological marvel but it can’t take photographs, only the photographer can do that. To succeed it involves making an incredible complex of choices and only one chance in the entire history of time to (...) make them as close to perfect as possible. A carefree snap - easy, a composed and considered picture, well, that requires a synergy of skills and perhaps a dash of genius. So that's why this album is such a treat to revel in, its a feast of the worlds best gardens, gardeners, the plants and animals growing and living in them in the very best photographic forms. The images will 'wow' you, make you wish you had been there, wish it was your garden in the picture or wish you had squeezed the button. It’s a testament to a huge array of skills and a catalogue of remarkable beauty’. Chris Packham – BBC Presenter and photographer. (shrink)

Summary Ferdinand von Mueller (1825–96), the German-born Government Botanist of Victoria from 1853 until his death, and concurrently Director of the Melbourne Botanic Garden from 1857 until 1873, was a prolific systematic botanist, but also heavily involved in public educational activities. He conceived of the Garden as an educative place of recreation, but ultimately lost control over it. His loss did not stop his popular writing and lecturing, especially in areas related to the application of botany in horticulture, agriculture, (...) and forestry. The structure of his introductory school text—very different from the intensely logical grammar-like botany texts of the period—owed much to his political masters, but it is characterized by careful attention to language and locality. Mueller's work represents a consistent and pervasive example of attention to the ‘public understanding of science’ that resonates with the concerns of early twenty-first-century funders of scientific research. (shrink)

New York may be most easily recognized by its trademark skyscrapers and brick tenement buildings, but the truth is that the city is actually teeming with luxurious roof gardens and private courtyard oases. Creative gardeners and architects have risen to meet the unique challenges of the urban landscape, designing spaces that celebrate the city while providing a restful escape. New York City Gardens presents New York’s evolving tradition of garden culture through images and discussions of thirty of its (...) most outstanding gardens, from world-famous botanical gardens to richly re-cultivated public urban spaces, luxurious penthouse terraces, and innovative art gardens without soil or plants. Many of the gardens are set against vistas of the quintessential New York—Central Park, the Empire State Building, skyscrapers of Midtown, and the sensational skyline of Lower Manhattan. Other gardens reveal surprising and exotic intimate retreats from the bustle of the city. While most were designed by noted landscape architects, including Dan Kiley, Hideo Sasaki, Ken Smith, and Halsted Wells, many others were created over decades by talented homeowners themselves. As more and more city dwellers in New York and beyond look to cultivate their own kitchen and container gardens and individual outdoor sanctuaries, this book provides hundreds of inspiring images as well as historical background and insight into the practical and imaginative solutions of city garden designers. (shrink)

In 1766 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in exile from France and Switzerland, came to England, where he made the acquaintance of Margaret Cavendish Harley Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. The two began to botanise together and to exchange letters about botany. These letters contain salient statements about Rousseau's views on natural theology, gardens, botanical texts and exotic botany. This exchange entailed not only discussions about plant identifications and other botanical matters, but most important, reciprocal gifts of books and specimens in the manner (...) of gentlemanly scientific correspondence of the period. Rousseau volunteered his services as the Duchess's ‘herborist’ or plant collector, and collected specimens and seeds in her behalf; these were destined for her own extensive herbaria and other natural history collections. Rousseau, who elsewhere denied female talent for science, admired the Duchess's knowledge of natural history, acknowledging his own as inferior. Their correspondence ended when the Duchess sent him the Herbarium amboinense of Georg Rumpf (Rumphius), an important work of exotic botany. Rousseau considered exotic botany to be the antithesis of the domination-free nature from which he derived solace and inspiration. (shrink)

This article attempts to provide an overview and discussion of Plutarch’s views in his Moralia about emotions and their relation to moral virtue and reason. By tracking different clusters of imagery – artisanal, zoological and botanic – that Plutarch uses in his essays to articulate the relationship between emotions and reason, it explores three philosophical perspectives on emotions: emotions of a virtuous person are likened to a well-shaped piece of material; to animals that need to be guided or reined (...) in by their master; and to wholesome plants in a garden. Each of these imageries is used to support a different account of moral virtue: virtue as the emotional disposition to feel moderately; virtue as the obedience of emotions to the commands of reason; and virtue as the absence of bad emotions and flourishing of the good ones. This analysis enables us to weigh the influences of major philosophers on Plutarch’s account, and to elucidate his commitment on both metriopatheia and apatheia. (shrink)

Books were materially and metaphorically botanical in the early modern period. This article uses The Garden of Cyrus, Thomas Browne’s wide-ranging philosophical tract, to illustrate how the often self-conscious links between books and gardens could operate in epistemologically significant ways. It argues that Browne’s repeated positioning of his book as a garden creates a productive model for aesthetic, theological and scientific experimentation and innovation. The framework of the garden constructs a space in which the foremost, apparently contradictory, models of (...) knowledge associated with the seventeenth-century garden—the analogical approach of the doctrine of signatures and the empirical approach associated with the “new science”—can coexist. Extrapolating from the book of nature to suggest the inherently discursive and rhetorical forms of Browne’s knowledge as well as its limitations, the article concludes by proposing a new spatial model for this kind of coterminous literary and experimental approach: the elaboratory. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe popularity of botany and natural history in England combined with the demographic changes of the first half of the nineteenth century to bring about a new aesthetics of gardening, fusing horticultural practice with a connoisseurship of botanical science. Horticultural societies brought theoretical botany into the practice of gardening. Botanical and horticultural periodicals disseminated both science and prescriptions for practice, yoking them to a progressive social agenda, including the betterment of the working class and urban planning. Finally, botany was (...) incorporated into systems of education, reinforcing the union of theory and practice.Three garden plans from the 1790s, 1835, and 1846 illustrate the embodiment of this theory and practice in the design of private suburban gardens. These horticultural/botanical gardens, described in the second half of the article, represent a neglected side of botany's bifurcated descent from Renaissance collections of curiosities into horticultural gardening and herbarium-based systematics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAbel Evans's poem Vertumnus celebrates Jacob Bobart the Younger, second keeper of the Oxford Physick Garden, as a model monarch to his botanical subjects. This paper takes Vertumnus as a point of departure from which to explore the early history of the Physick Garden, situating botanical collections and collecting spaces within utopian visions and projects as well as debates about order more widely in the turbulent seventeenth-century. Three perspectives on the Physick Garden as an ordered collection are explored: the architecture (...) of the quadripartite Garden, with particular attention to the iconography of the Danby Gate; the particular challenges involved in managing living collections, whose survival depends on the spatial order regulating the microclimates in which they grow; and the taxonomic ordering associated with the hortus siccus collections. A final section on the ideal ‘Botanick throne’ focuses on the metaphor of the state as a garden in the period, as human and botanical subjects resist being order and can rebel, but also respond to right rule and wise cultivation. However, the political metaphor is Evans’s; there is little to suggest that Bobart himself was driven by utopian, theological and political visions. (shrink)

Nehemiah Grew is rightly lauded as one of the first and most sophisticated promoters of the discipline of plant anatomy—the observation and representation of the insides of plants. Overlooked so far, though, are his activities as a plant collector. In this paper, I reconstruct Grew's plant-collection practices from his first medical garden, through his incorporation of specimens from the Royal Society's repository, and to its expansion through his support of intercontinental plant-gathering missions. These activities gave Grew access both to fresh, (...) local plant samples, which he could observe again and again, as well as to foreign specimens that exhibited some of the more curious variations of nature. I argue that these different plant-collecting strategies reflected his overarching ambitions with his plant anatomy, which was to construct an idealised model of plant formation, generation, and growth. In order to do this, Grew pieced together his observations of individual specimens into one generalised model through the method of collation. While not offering concrete advice on how to grow plants more efficiently, I argue that Grew's idealised representation of the processes of plant life was offered as a framework for further botanical experimentation. (shrink)

Il saggio difende l'idea che i contesti più congeniali allo sviluppo ed e- sercizio di un carattere virtuoso dal punto di vista ambientale siano i giar- dini – e il modo migliore per sviluppare ed esercitare tale carattere sia con- servare specie botaniche, coltivandone esemplari con le proprie mani. La coltivazione di un giardino permette, e richiede, una certa comprensione e accettazione di importanti dimensioni del rapporto uomo-natura, le quali innescano comportamenti positivi che, consolidandosi nel tempo attraverso abitudine e riflessione, (...) diventano veri e propri tratti caratteriali virtuosi. Le virtù sviluppate ed esercitate in giardino contribuiranno in modo decisivo alla buona riuscita dei nostri futuri sforzi verso la sostenibilità, perché avranno un prezioso aspetto operativo, assente dalle virtù ambientali tipi- camente contemplative che l'individuo può invece sviluppare ed esercitare in aree naturali non umanizzate.The paper argues that gardens are contexts obviously congenial to the de- velopment and exercise of a virtuous environmental character, and the practice most conducive to such objective is that of conserving botanical species in them, cultivating specimens with one's own two hands. Garden practices enable and require a certain understanding and acceptance of a number of crucial dimension of the man-nature relationship, triggering re- current positive environmental behavior that, through reflective habituation, eventually solidifies into environmentally virtuous character traits. The virtues developed and exercised in gardens will greatly contribute to our future efforts towards sustainability, for they will possess a precious operative dimension, absent from the typically contemplative virtues that an individual can instead develop and exercise in non- humanized natural areas. (shrink)

Tracing the contributions of Edgar Anderson (1897-1969) of the Missouri Botanical Garden to the important discussions in evolutionary biology in the 1940s, this paper argues that Anderson turned to corn research rather than play a more prominent role in what is now known as the Evolutionary Synthesis. His biosystematic studies of Iris and Tradescantia in the 1930s reflected such Synthesis concerns as the species question and population thinking. He shared the 1941 Jesup Lectures with Ernst Mayr. But rather than preparing (...) his lectures as a potentially key text in the Synthesis, Anderson began researching Zea mays -- its taxonomy, its origin, and its agronomic role. In this study, Anderson drew on the disciplines of taxonomy, morphology, genetics, geography, anthropology, archaeology, and agronomy among others in his own creative synthesis. Though his maize research in the 1940s represented the most sustained work of his career, Anderson was also drawn in many directions during his professional life. For example, he enjoyed teaching, working with amateurs, and popular writing. (shrink)

The contemporary ‘plant turn’, driven by modern scientific researches into plant potentialities and a renewed philosophical appreciation of botanical lives within Critical Plant Studies, has spurred discussions about the attribution of personhood to plants. However, anxieties subtend the notion of plant personhood, for it being predominantly anchored in an anthropocentric paradigm of autonomous and embodied ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’ properties of plant ontology. Drawing from Indigenous Naga animist vegetal ethos and building upon the arguments of Matthew Hall and Michael Marder, the (...) article attempts to transcend this impasse by conceptualising a neological framework of co-constitutive and reciprocal syntropic capacities as the defining elements of a non-anthropocentric vegetal personhood. Subsequently, the study employs this syntropic model of plant personhood to analyse the ethno-literary representations of vegetal agency and communication as syntropic plant capacities within the context of Indigenous Naga animist culture in two short stories from Temsula Ao’s anthology The Tombstone in My Garden (2022). On the whole, the article explores how the syntropic capacities of plants can function as a connective complement between the Western discourses of Critical Plant Studies and the Indigenous Naga animist arboreal worldviews to facilitate re-membering of an ecocentric plant personhood. (shrink)

When the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in South London were opened to the general public in the 1840s, they were presented as a ‘world text’: a collection of flora from all over the world, with the spectacular tropical (read: colonial) specimens taking centre stage as indexes of Britain’s imperial supremacy. However, the one exotic plant species that preoccupied the British cultural imagination more than any other remained conspicuously absent from the collection: the banyan tree, whose non-transferability left (...) a significant gap in the ‘text’ of the garden, thereby effectively puncturing the illusion of comprehensive global command that underpins the biopolitical designs of what Richard Grove has aptly dubbed ‘green imperialism’. This article demonstrates how, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the banyan tree became an object of fascination and admiration for British scientists, painters, writers and photographers precisely because of its obstinate non-availability to colonial control and visual or even conceptual representability. (shrink)