The dominion of flowers: botanical art and global plant relations

Abstract

"Between 1760 and 1840, exotic plants were imported from across Britain's empire and were lavishly depicted in periodicals and scientific treatises as specimens collected alongside other objects of natural history. Mark Laird's provocative new book - part art history, part polemic - weaves fine art, botanical illustration and previously unpublished archival material into a political and ethical account of Britain's heritage, showing how plants were not only integral to English gardens of the Georgian and Victorian eras but also to British culture more broadly. The Dominion of Flowers shines with captivating cross-cultural plant stories. The book opens with the Seymers' exotic Butterflies and Plants and Pulteney's catalogue of Dorset's native wildflowers. It then moves to the German artist John Miller and his illustrations for Lord Bute's Botanical Tables and concludes by tracing Britain's fascination with New Zealand's unique flora, first depicted in Mary Delany's collages. Copiously illustrated with almost two hundred works, and drawing on Laird's genealogical research into his own family's colonial past, this volume foregrounds Indigenous ideas about 'plant relations' in a study that brings the trans-oceanic movement of plants and people alive"-- Publisher description.

Contents

Preface -- Introduction. The Sage's Visit to Lord Bute's Luton Hoo: Trustworthy Histories and English Trusts ; Historic Exploitation as an Incubus for Heritage in England ; The Gender Bias in World Heritage: Women's Wages and Plant Prices ; 'Old Corruption' and a New Accounting: The Value of Equivalent Calculations ; Under the Greenwood Tree: Tolpuddle Martyrs, Sycamore and the National Trust ; Public Campaigns and Penal Transportation: Land Ownership versus Land Rights ; Emigration from Hampshire to New Zealand: Antipodes of Shrubbery and Bush ; Ancestor John Holdaway and Hemi Pōmare's Māori Ancestry ; The Birth of Trusts and the Hundred Years since the Plumage (Prohibition) Act of 1921 -- Legacies. Background Notes ; Introduction ; Henry Seymer's Indebtedness to Thomas Robin's 'Florilegium' ; Henry Seymer Junior and the Luke Robins Connection ; Botanical Art in Dorset in the Shadow of Sugar-Making ; Exotic or Native, Naturalised or Cultivated: Plant Identities ; Botanising and Shell Collecting: Seymer, Pulteney and the Duchess of Portland ; Dr Richard Pulteney: Linnaean Studies and his Dorsetshire Flora ; Pulteney's Some More Rare Plants of Dorsetshire: Vetches ; Pulteney's Some More Rare Plants of Dorsetshire: Orchids ; Pulteney and Foundational Research: Botanists before and after Him ; Dorset Reserves under Trust and the Return of a Native ; The Balance Sheet Today -- Luminaries. Background Notes ; Introduction: The German and Scottish Milieu in Botany and Horticulture ; Illustratio systematis sexualis Linnaei ; Bute and Miller and the Collaboration on Botanical Tables ; The Psychological and Scientific Nature of Bute's Botanical Tables ; Public and Private Audiences: Delany's Collages and Zoffany's Portraiture ; Luton Hoo and Primogeniture: Bute's Botanical Legacy as a Family Venture ; Complications in 'Simple Leaves' and Simplifications in Ladies' Botany ; The Out-of-Office Achievements of a Prime Minister ; The Earl of Bute and the Duchess of Portland: Patron Collectors ; Luton Hoo in Mary Delany's Collages and Paul Sandby's Topographical Views ; The Remnants of Lord Bute's Building and Botanising at Highcliffe -- Ancestries. Background Notes ; Introduction: Plant Heritage of New Zealand Pioneers and Pioneering Māori Claims ; First New Zealanders: Two Sophora Species, later renamed Edwardsia ; First New Zealanders: Solanum laciniatum and Leptospermum scoparium ; First and Foremost among Māori Plants : Phormium tenax in England ; A Second Wave of New Zealanders: Fuchsia excorticata and Cordyline australis ; From Clematis indivisa to the Case of Hebe versus Veronica ; Pōhutukawa and rātā: Metrosideros excelsa and Metrosideros robusta in England ; Kākābeak/Ngutukākā: Clianthus puniceus of Crimson Glory-Pea in England ; From the Plants of First Nations' Aotearoa to First in their Class in England ; Kōwhai the Wound Healer: Māori Heritage and a Future 'World First' -- Epilogue. Worldwide Approaches to protecting Natural Heritage and the Personhood of Plants ; Reassessing England's Cultural Heritage in the World and repositioning Painshill Park Trust ; Renaming/Reframing within Cultural World Heritage.