The Dominion of Flowers

How a wave of exotic botanical imports from across Britains empire shaped its gardens and psyche Between 1760 and 1840, exotic plants were imported from across Britains empire and were lavishly depicted in periodicals and scientific treatises as specimens collected alongside other objects of natural history. Mark Lairds provocative new bookpart art history, part polemicweaves fine art, botanical illustration, and previously unpublished archival material into a political and ethical account of Britains heritage, showing how plants were not only integral to English gardens of the Georgian and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 Pulteneys catalogue of Dorsets native wildflowers. It then moves to the German artist John Miller and his illustrations for Lord Butes Botanical Tables and concludes by tracing Britains fascination with New Zealands unique flora, first depicted in Mary Delanys collages. Copiously illustrated with almost two hundred works, and drawing on Lairds genealogical research into his own familys colonial past, this volume foregrounds Indigenous ideas about plant relations in a study that brings the trans-oceanic movement of plants and people alive.