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ABSTRACT
Abel Evans's poem Vertumnus (1713) celebrates Jacob Bobart the Younger, second keeper of the Oxford Physick Garden (now the Oxford University Botanic 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 (founded 1621), 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.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Lauren Kassell and William Poole for their valuable comments on a draft of this paper, and to my supervisors Sabine Höhler and Peder Roberts. Thanks also to Scott Mandelbrote and Stephen Harris for conversations that were important to the development of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Able Evans, Vertumnus: An Epistle to Mr. Jacob Bobart, Botany Professor to the University of Oxford and Keeper of the Physick-Garden (Oxford, 1713), p. 3. Vertumnus refers to the Roman god of the changing seasons and of gardens.
2 Emma C. Spary, Utopia's Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
3 Thomas More, ‘Utopia’, in Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, the Isle of Pines, ed. by Susan Bruce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 50. More’s original Latin text was first translated into English by Ralph Robinson in 1551 (with further editions in 1556, 1597 and 1624), with a new translation by Gilbert Burnet (1684) published contemporary to the concerns of this paper.
4 Hubertus Fischer, ‘Utopia, Science and Garden Art in the Early Modern Era’, in Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Volker R. Remmert Hubertus Fischer and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016), p. 170.
5 Lodwick’s manuscript was first published in 2007: Francis Lodwick (1619/1694) a country not named (MS. Sloane 913, Fols. 1r/33r): an edition with an annotated primary bibliography and an introductory essay on Lodwick and his intellectual context, ed. by William Poole (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007).
6 Evans, Vertumnus.
7 A commemorative stone in front of the garden honours the memory of those buried at the site, which was a medieval cemetery for the Jews of Oxford from the late twelfth century until it was appropriated by the Hospital of St John in 1231, followed by the expulsion of the Jews in the late thirteenth century.
8 Chandra Mukerji describes the Potager du Roi at Versailles as a fortress, with the walls reflecting a ‘view of gardening as an exercise of power equivalent to the military use of force’. Chandra Mukerji, ‘The Power of the Sun-King at the Potager Du Roi’, in Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Volker R. Remmert Hubertus Fischer and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016), p. 62.
9 For all intents and purposes, Bobart the Elder was the first Keeper. Danby first appointed the famous John Tradescant the Elder, who is commonly thought to have died before he had time to start working in the garden. According Jennifer Potter, however, Tradescant actually had time to take up his post. Jennifer Potter, Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants (London: Atlantic Books, 2006).
10 There is come confusion concerning who designed the gate. Attributions to Jones have been dismissed by, for instance, Jennifer Sherwood and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 267.
11 Vernon J. Watney, Cornbury and the Forest of Wychwood (printed privately by Hartchards, London, 1910), p. 116.
12 Evans, Vertumnus.
13 Andrew Marvell, ‘Upon Appleton House’, in Marvell: The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. by Nigel Smith (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007).
14 Robert T. Gunther, Oxford Gardens (Oxford: Parker and Son, 1912), p. 13.
15 Evans was an associate of Alexander Pope, whose poem Windsor-Forest (published, like Vertumnus, in 1713) also combine war and politics with a portrayal of natural order. Pat Rogers’ analysis of Windsor-Forest also provides valuable insight in to the context in which Vertumnus was written, although he does not discuss Evans’s poem directly. Rogers argues that the omission of Blenheim and the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough from Pope’s poem is deliberate and conspicuous. ‘English politics under Anne are inseparable from the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, the most powerful man and woman among the Queen’s subjects for most of her reign. Any work of literature which dealt with the history of this period would inescapably run head-on into these two figures’. Pat Rogers, Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts: History, Politics and Mythology in the Age of Queen Anne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 209.
16 As Charles Webster has argued, university life was surprisingly resilient and continued largely unchanged despite the upheaval. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975).
17 Scott Mandelbrote, personal communication 2015-06-09. However, the first professor of botany at the Physic Garden, Robert Morison, clearly identified himself and was identified by others as a royalist. Morison had spent the Civil War in exile in France, after being injured for the royalist cause in 1639. He studied in Angers and Paris, before securing a position at the gardens of Blois. At the Restoration in 1660, when Charles II returned from exile, he invited Morison to be his royal physician. Thus his credentials and experience as a royal and royalist botanist were firmly established by the time he was appointed professor of botany at the Physick Garden in 1669.
18 William Hickes, Grammatical drollery consisting of poems & songs wherein the rules of the nouns & verbs in the accendence are pleasantly made easy, for the benefit of any that delight in a tract of this nature (London, 1682). The ‘Rump’ was what was left of the Long Parliament, after the arrest of members who had wished to negotiate with Charles I.
19 Gunther, Oxford Gardens, p. 175.
20 The statues were funded by a libel fine paid by the antiquarian Anthony à Wood. Ibid., p. 2.
21 For an analysis of the iconography of the frontispiece, see Clare Le Corbeiller, China Trade Porcelain: Patterns of Exchange: Additions to the Helena Woolworth McCann Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974). Le Corbeiller suggests that Michael Burghers was the engraver, as he had also engraved Loggan’s portrait of Bobart the Elder and fine bird’s eye view of the garden (1675). If so, the inclusion of both Bobart the Elder and the statues suggests that recognisability was more important than historical accuracy, and that the two kings had become an integral part of the iconography of the Danby Gate.
22 Karin Seeber, ‘Jacob Bobart (1596–1680): First Keeper of the Oxford Physic Garden’, Garden History 41, no. 2 (2013), 278–84 (p. 280).
23 For Versailles, see for instance Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
24 Karin Seeber, ‘“Ye Making of the Mount”: Oxford New College’s Mount Garden Revised’, Garden History 40, no. 1 (2012), 3–16.
25 The role of topiary in royal propaganda is discussed by Giulia Pacini, ‘The Monarchy Shapes Up: Arboreal Metaphors in Royal Propaganda and Court Panegyrics During the Reign of Louis XV’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 3 (2016).
26 ‘Orders for the Physic Garden’ included in Gunther, Oxford Gardens, p. 173.
27 T. F. R. G. Braun, ‘The Fellows’ Garden until 1720’, Postmaster: The Merton College Magazine, Trinity 1985.
28 Gunther, Oxford Gardens, p. 189.
29 In this and other respects, Evans's poetic account resembles Francis Vernon’s earlier description of the Garden in Oxonium poema (1667). Within the regal, splendid walls (‘regalibus Hortus,/Splendida quadrati jactat munimina muri’), he describes a wide range of fruits, trees and flowers (which like the stars are too many to count) and celebrates the garden as a source of healing for weakened nature and sickness.
30 Stephen A. Harris, ‘Seventeenth-Century Plant Lists and Herbarium Collections: A Case Study from the Oxford Physic Garden’, Journal of the History of Collections, published electronically 8 June 2017, p. 5 of 14.
31 As Robert Sharrock notes, Francis Bacon particularly valued the ‘Acceleration of Plants in their Germination and Maturity’. Robert Sharrock, The History of the Propagation & Improvement of Vegetables (Oxford, 1660), p. 129.
32 Harris, ‘Seventeenth-Century Plant Lists’.
33 Gregory Grämiger, ‘Reconstructing Order: The Spatial Arrangements of Plants in the Hortus Botanicus of Leiden University in Its First Years’, in Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Volker R. Remmert, Hubertus Fischer and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016).
34 Ibid., p. 249.
35 Evans, Vertumnus.
36 Jack Arthur Walter Bennett and Scott Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Museum of the History of Science in association with the Bodleian Library, 1998).
37 The prefatory poem as a porch was a common conceit. See for instance the mystic Jane Leade’s, A fountain of gardens watered by the rivers of divine pleasure, and springing up in all variety of spiritual plants, blown up by the pure breath into a paradise: to which is prefixed a poem, introductory to the Philadelphian Age, called Solomons porch, or The beautiful gate to wisdoms temple.
38 Evans, Vertumnus.
39 Ibid., p. 11 (Bold emphasis added.)
40 Robert Plot and Jacob Bobart, ‘A Discourse Concerning the Effects of the Great Frost, on Trees and Other Plants Anno 1683’, Philosophical Transactions (1684). The winters were particularly harsh in the mid-17th century.
41 Plot sent out these queries as part of an investigation initiated at one of the newly formed Oxford Philosophical Society’s early meetings, held in the Ashmolean Museum of which he was the first Keeper. See Robert T. Gunther, Oxford Colleges and Their Men of Science, vol. 11 of Early Science in Oxford (Oxford, 1937), pp. 209–10.
42 Ibid., p. 787.
43 Ibid., p. 786.
44 Fischer, ‘Utopia, Science and Garden Art’, p. 174.
45 This was suggested by John Evelyn, who was working on a monumental universal treatise on gardening, Elysium Britannicum, that was never published.
46 Robert Sharrock, The History of the Propagation & Improvement of Vegetables (Oxford, 1660), p. 136.
47 Bobart’s equivalent in Uppsala, Olof Rudbeck the Elder, gives a clear expression of the sheer hard work and perseverance needed to grow plants ‘from all parts of the world’ (‘ifrån alla werdsens delar’) is found in the letter to the reader in the garden catalogue, Catalogus Plantarum … (Uppsala, 1685). Rudbeck goes on to list several pages worth of the diversity of specific requirements of different plants. Rudbeck is an important figure in the intersection of botany and utopia, as he argued in the four volume long Atlantica (1677–1702) that Sweden was the lost Atlantis and Swedish the original Edenic language.
48 Lydia Barnett, ‘The Theology of Climate Change: Sin as Agency in the Enlightenment’s Anthropocene’, Environmental History 20, no. 2 (2015).
49 John Ray, ‘A Discourse on the Particular Differences of Plants’, Letter read to the Royal Society in 1674. For Ray and his contemporaries’ debates about the creation of the world, see William Poole, The World Makers: Scientists of the Restoration and the Search for the Origins of the Earth (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010).
50 For a discussion on John Evelyn conflicted interest in neo-Epicurianism, see Michael Leslie, ‘“Without Design, or Fate, or Force”: Why Couldn't John Evelyn Complete the Elysium Britannicum?’, in Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Volker R. Remmert, Hubertus Fischer and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016).
51 However, it should be noted that the variety of surviving seventeenth-century herbaria (in quality, size, accuracy and aesthetic appeal) suggests a wide range of reasons for creating and circulating hortus siccus collections. This includes presentation copies to royalty, souvenirs bought on the Grand Tour and a pedagogical tool mastered by medical students.
52 Evans, Vertumnus, p. 29.
53 See Stephen Harris’s analysis of the catalogues against the herbaria, ‘Seventeenth-Century Plant Lists’.
54 See Scott Mandelbrote on the complicated publication history of the Plantarum. Scott Mandelbrote, ‘The Publication and Illustration of Robert Morison’s Plantarum Historiae Universalis Oxoniensis’, Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 2 (2015).
55 Sydney Howard Vines, ‘Robert Morison 1620–1683 and John Ray 1627–1705’, in Makers of British Botany: A Collection of Biographies by Living Botanists, ed. by Francis Wall Oliver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913).
56 Morison, however, was openly antagonistic towards it, although it has been suggested that Wilkins initially approached Morison to do the section on plants but that he turned it down. Ibid., p. 32.
57 See Stephen Harris and Peter Anstey for John Locke’s botanical activities in relation to the Bobarts. Peter R. Anstey and Stephen A. Harris, ‘Locke and Botany’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C 37, no. 2 (2006); Stephen A. Harris and Peter R. Anstey, ‘John Locke’s Seed Lists: A Case Study in Botanical Exchange’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40, no. 4 (2009).
58 Vines, ‘Robert Morison 1620–1683 and John Ray 1627–1705’, p. 35.
59 Harris suggests that Sherard may also have had a key role in acting as a go-between, being a good friend of Ray’s (personal communication).
60 See Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
61 John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London: The Royal Society, 1668).
62 Staffan Müller-Wille, ‘Systems and How Linnaeus Looked at Them in Retrospect’, Annals of Science 70, no. 3 (2013), 317.
63 Richard Pulteney, Historical and Biographical Sketches of the Progress of Botany in England from its Origin to the Introduction of the Linnæan System, 2 vols (London: printed for T. Cadell … , 1790), p. 352.
64 Julius von Sachs, History of Botany (1530–1860), trans. by Henry E. F. Garnsey, rev. Isaac Bayley Balfour (New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), p. 81.
65 Harris, ‘Seventeenth-Century Plant Lists’ (p. 5 of 14).
66 Christine Adams, ‘Francis Bacon’s Wedding Gift of “A Garden of a Glorious and Strange Beauty” for the Earl and Countess of Somerset’, Garden History 36, no. 1 (2008), 38–39.
67 For a thorough analysis of cultivation and acclimatisation in the context of the French Revolution, see Spary, Utopia’s Garden.
68 Quoted in Fischer, ‘Utopia, Science and Garden Art’, p. 175.
69 J. C. Davis notes that ‘ … this extension of social discipline until it embraced the whole of men’s lives involved an almost complete loss of liberty. To Burton this was rather illusory than lamentable. ‘Servitude, loss of liberty, punishment, are no such miseries as they are held to be: we are slaves and servants the best of all … ’ Freedom from disorder and sloth, the twin causes of social melancholy, might well be paid for in the coin of personal liberty’. J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516–1700, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
70 Burton, Robert, The anatomy of melancholy: What it is, with all the kinds causes, symptomes, prognostickes, & seuerall cures of it. In three partitions, with their severall sections, members & subsections. Philosophically, medicinally, historically, opened & cut up. By. Democritus Iunior. With a satyricall preface, conducing to the following discourse., The fifth edition, corrected and augmented by the author. Printed [by Robert Young, Edinburgh, 1635?, by Miles Flesher, London, 1638, and by Leonard Lichfield and William Turner, Oxford] for Henry Cripps, Oxford, 1638.
71 Noel Malcolm, ‘The Titlepage of Leviathan, Seen in a Curious Perspective’, in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
72 Vertumnus is one of a series of composite portraits by Arcimboldo. See for instance Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
73 See for instance, Mukerji, ‘The Power of the Sun-King’.
74 Spary, Utopia’s Garden, p. 257.