Chinese Flowers and the Idea of Cultivation in Early-Nineteenth-Century British Word and Image

ABSTRACT

This essay uses the example of the Chinese tree peony, a flower much desired by British gardeners at the start of the nineteenth century as well as a flower much reproduced in horticultural periodicals and on consumer commodities, to explain the era's interconnected understanding of the process of cultivation. Organic cultivations, foreign and domestic, were not separated from social and personal cultivations in verbal and visual discourse but rather mutually reinforced each other. Following these connections helps explain the ever-growing estrangement between nineteenth-century subjects and the nature that surrounded them in terms that connect environmental, aesthetic, and literary history.

Notes

1. For histories of gardening composed in the nineteenth century, see Amherst; for more recent accounts, see Hadfield, Helmreich, Hunt, Willis, and especially Laird. As Longstaffe-Gowan has insisted, we must account for the ways that “gardening on a modest scale affected the lives of many citizens … figured among the rituals of the daily round; and … gratified the material aspirations of the city's mercantile classes” (xi). Notable treatments of botanical and gardening practice within literature include Lynch's “greenhouse romanticism” and King's “botanical vernacular.”

2. I acknowledge the influence and importance of gardens in other foreign spaces for the British, particular in British India. See Herbert.

3. For a comprehensive survey of the flower's place in global human history, see Goody.

4. On commodities high and low, see Berg, as well as Appadurai. Also of relevance here is the field of thing theory, especially the ways that Plotz has theorized durable yet mobile horticultural property.

5. Ecocritics, most notably Timothy Morton, have greatly expanded on this problem; see Morton as well as Heise.

6. See Grove and Brockway.

7. On eighteenth-century attitudes towards China, see Porter and Yang.

8. Two examples of these resituations influential to this essay are Kriegel and Kalba.

9. For another approach to the identification of foreign plants, see Warren.

10. On japonisme, see Lambourne; on the redeployment of Chinese influence during the last decades of the twentieth century, see Laurence.

11. Lynn Voskiull has powerfully related a narrative of global environment through an investigation parallel to mine. For two examples from the point of view of botanical historians, see Dehnen-Schmutz and Williamson and Tachibana and Watkins.

12. For more on these, see Fan.

13. On the famous nursery gardens see also Le Rougetel 70–73.

14. The complexity of interaction between trade and horticulture is suggested by Joseph Sabine's description of the exchange process. Sabine writes: “At the time when the Moutans blossom in the Chinese gardens, the officers of the East India Company are absent at Macao, to which place they remove after the departure of the ships, the latest of which usually sails in February, or early in March, so that those English gentlemen who attend to plants there, have not the opportunity of seeing the different varieties in flower; and the knowledge of them is consequently confined to the native residents of Canton. This circumstance will account for the uncertainty which still exists respecting their number and differences” (466–67).

15. For attention to the anthropological priorities of collecting in the wild by British botanists, see Mueggler.

16. On the conceptual sweep of the landscape garden, see Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the works of John Dixon Hunt.

17. On the metaphorical and actual possibilities of glass, see Armstrong; on the techniques used to commodify and display the tropics, see Tobin.

18. On the latter debate, see Dolan.

19. See “Pæonia Moutan,” Plate 1154, Curtis's Botanical Magazine Vol. 29, 1809, reproduced on Wikimedia Commons as ”Paeonia suffruticosa Bot. Mag. 29.1154.1809.jpgv”: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paeonia_suffruticosa_Bot._Mag._29.1154.1809.jpg

20. One of the most helpful general assessments of this period of literature remains Desmond, “Victorian Gardening Magazines.”

21. See Dewis (77–98).

22. On this practice, see Longstaffe-Gowan.

23. For a slightly later perspective on working-class floral societies, see Veder. See also Duthie.

24. On silk designs see Kraak.