Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeIssues XXIX-1Botany, Informal Empire and the C...

Botany, Informal Empire and the Colonial Roots of British Gardens

Botanique et empire informel : les racines coloniales des jardins britanniques
Frances O’Morchoe

Abstracts

This article investigates the practices of colonial science through a study of one plant collector working for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, an institution of Britain’s informal empire in China. Further, the article situates this collector and his work in the context of the boom in popular gardening in Britain at the time. Popular garden writing in the late 19th and early 20th century helped fold China’s temperate plants into the canon of “natural” British plants. I argue that garden writers used a “temperate imagination” to encourage readers to imagine the connections between their own gardens and the temperate realms of Britain’s empire. These authors, and the plants they described, helped bring empire home to amateur gardeners in Britain.

Top of page

Full text

Introduction

1In 1988, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother gave a journalist a tour around her garden:

  • 1 Alan Hamilton, “Blue blood, green fingers”, The Times (London), 23 May 1988.

The true essence of Royal Lodge, she still feels, is its woodland garden, largely created in its present form by herself and her husband. It is at its best about now, with the rhododendron glades in full flower and the trees still freshly verdant. The acid Bagshot sand encourages many handsome rhododendron hybrids, including “Norman Gill” with its large white flowers with a red blotch at the base, and naturally the very pale “King George”. Bluebells and yellow azaleas complete the carpet beneath a fine selection of flowering trees, including tulip and a magnificent Davidia involucrate, the so-called handkerchief tree and the largest example of it in the country.1

  • 2 Report of the Director of the Botanical Survey of India for the Year 1910-11, Calcutta: Botanical S (...)
  • 3 D. J. Mabberley, “Wilson, Ernest Henry (1876–1930)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxfor (...)

2The trees and shrubs mentioned here are fixtures of many British gardens today, to the extent that their colonial origins are sometimes forgotten. Norman Gill, after whom the Queen Mother’s rhododendron is named, was the Superintendent of Kumaon Government Garden in the United Provinces in British India, who supervised Indian collectors working in the Himalayas.2 The handkerchief tree was collected in 1900 with the aid of a British official working for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) – part of Britain’s “informal empire” in China.3

  • 4 See for instance Erik Mueggler, “‘The Lapponicum Sea’: Matter, Sense, and Affect in the Botanical E (...)
  • 5 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, Routledge, 1992).
  • 6 Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens ( (...)

3The surge in popular interest in gardening that took off in Britain in the second half of the 19th century coincided with the era of high imperialism. “Plant hunters” travelled the world in search of new species to fill the herbaria of academic botanists in places like Kew Gardens, but also to fill the gardens of ordinary Britons at home.4 I argue that plants were imperial commodities that brought empire home to Britain, a “contact zone” between Britain and the world.5 Historical studies of colonial botany have shown how these collectors’ work contributed to imperial domination. Botanical gardens are well known to scholars as important institutions of colonial expansion, being instrumental in transfers of plantation crops such as rubber and cinchona.6 But scholars have paid less attention to how these plant collectors and the plants they collected impacted popular culture in Britain. By studying both of these facets of the work of one plant collector working in China – his work as a botanist working for Britain’s informal empire in China, and how the plants he collected were transplanted into British gardens – I aim to show how Britain’s informal empire in China impacted British culture as well as science.

  • 7 Jürgen Osterhammel, “Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Fra (...)
  • 8 James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, N.C. (...)

4China remained independent through the 19th century, but the extent of Europeans powers’ influence over the country has led historians to call it “informal empire”.7 While stopping short of formal annexation, foreign powers dramatically increased their influence over China during the 19th century. European powers forced the Qing to grant legal privileges known as “extraterritoriality” to foreigners, to cede control over ports and taxation, to accept the loss of Hong Kong, and to accede to the creation of ever more “treaty ports” occupied by the Western powers.8

5First, I investigate the intersection of botany and Britain’s informal empire in China. Through a study of one individual’s collecting practices, I show the networks around which botanical knowledge travelled, the agency which collectors exercised, and how the plant collector’s position, working for an institution of informal empire while moonlighting as a botanist, affected the nature of his botanical work. Second, I situate colonial plant collectors in the context of the popular gardening boom that was ongoing in Britain at the time. Garden writers encouraged their readers to imagine the connections between their own gardens and the temperate realms of Britain’s empire. Through a “temperate imagination”, I argue that these gardening books and the plants which they described helped bring empire home to British amateur gardeners, literally as well as figuratively. I define the “temperate imagination” as the process by which writers encouraged their readers to imagine the world’s temperate realms as homely, pleasant, and the opposite of the harsh, alien, “Other” of the tropics. In the case of popular garden writing, authors explained to amateur gardeners how to see temperate plants from places like China and India as “natural” and “at home” in British gardens.

Botany and informal empire

  • 9 Augustine Henry, “Midst Chinese Forests”, The Garden: An Illustrated Weekly Journal of Gardening in (...)

6Dr Augustine Henry was one of the most prolific of the botanical collectors working in China in the late 19th century. Born in Dundee, Scotland, and brought up in Ireland, Henry went to China in 1881 to work for the CMCS as a medical officer. After a few months in Shanghai, he was sent to Ichang, then the furthest point on the Yangtze that was navigable by steam. It was in Ichang that he first began to collect plants. There, he explained, the region’s remarkable biodiversity of plants, and the fact that he was “a pioneer digger in a glorious gold-field”, meant that despite having “no previous training or knowledge […] many new genera and hundreds of new species have fallen to my trowel and knife since that day”.9 This section considers the intersection of botany and informal empire in Yunnan in southwest China. Focusing on the work of one collector, it argues that Henry’s collecting activities can tell us much about science and informal empire in China.

  • 10 Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA (...)
  • 11 Paul A. Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700-1845 (Hong Kong, H (...)

7In the early 19th century, European botanical collectors in China had been largely limited to “exploring” the gardens and markets of Canton and Macao.10 Under the Canton System, which lasted from 1757 to 1842, the Qing emperor restricted foreigners to the ports of Canton and Macao.11 The Canton System came to an end after China’s defeat in the Opium War (1839-1842) when under the terms of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the European powers forced China to open her economy to increased foreign trade.

  • 12 Roy Lancaster, Travels in China: A Plantsman’s Paradise (Suffolk, Antique Collectors’ Club, 1989), (...)

8In the 19th century, missionaries were some of the most important botanical collectors working in interior provinces such as Yunnan. Almost immediately after the interior of China was opened to foreign travel, and in some cases before, missionaries travelled inland to proselytise. Some of the most famous botanical collectors in China were French missionaries. Armand David (1826-1900) was sent to China in 1862. He was the first Westerner to describe the “handkerchief” tree, Davidia involucrata, which he found in Hubei province. Another early French missionary to explore the flora of China’s inland provinces was Jean-Marie Delavay (1834-1895), who was sent to China in 1867 and from 1882 to his death, was stationed in Yunnan.12

  • 13 British Library, Sladen Papers, MSS Eur. E290/6; John Anderson, A Report on the Expedition to Weste (...)
  • 14 Emil Bretschneider, History of European Botanical Discoveries in China, Vol. II (London, Sampston, (...)

9As Europeans began to travel more to China’s interior, several British travellers visited Yunnan and began to tell of the rich diversity of plant species to be found there. Early collectors were often attached to missions exploring trade routes through southwest China. In 1868 John Anderson accompanied Colonel Sladen on his mission to explore trade routes to Yunnan via Bhamo in Upper Burma. Anderson was the “naturalist” of the expedition, collecting specimens of the local flora as they travelled through the province.13 Frederick Bourne of the British Consular Service also made a trip to Yunnan in 1885-1886 and in his official “Report of a Journey in Southwest China” listed the plants he discovered.14

  • 15 Robert Bickers, “Revisiting the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854-1950”, The Journal of Imperi (...)
  • 16 Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past.

10The Chinese Maritime Customs Service, or “Customs” as it was commonly known, was a key institution of Britain’s informal empire in China. Founded as the Foreign Inspectorate of Customs in Shanghai in 1854, customs houses were opened in treaty ports across China over the second half of the century.15 The Customs was an agency of the Chinese state, yet it was dominated by foreign nationals. Over time it increasingly arrogated to itself powers over China’s foreign trade and diplomacy.16 Several Customs outposts were established in southwest China in the closing years of the 19th century, but the lone foreign officials posted there found themselves with little work to do. Many of them took up botanical collecting to fill their spare time.

  • 17 Hans van de Ven, “Robert Hart and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service”, Modern Asian Studies 40:3 (...)
  • 18 Fa-ti Fan, “Victorian Naturalists in China: Science and Informal Empire”, British Journal for the H (...)
  • 19 Bretschneider, History of European Botanical Discoveries in China, p. 774; Archives of the Royal Bo (...)
  • 20 RBG Kew, DC 151, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 16 May 1896.
  • 21 Henry to Thiselton Dyer, c/o Customs Simao, 8 June 1898, in Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information, (...)

11For officials like Henry, botanical collecting was a reason to keep in touch with networks of friends and colleagues, mitigating the loneliness of the life of a consular official in remote parts of China. One of Henry’s fellow amateur botanists was Hosea Ballou Morse, a Statistical Secretary in the Customs. The two men were initially stationed at two treaty ports on the island of Formosa [Taiwan].17 There they began to collect plants, before both being transferred in the 1890s to different treaty ports on the mainland, where they continued to collect and correspond.18 While trade might have been the ostensible reason for the existence of treaty ports like Mengsi [Mengzi], where Henry was sent in 1896, in practice there was little of it and officials had plenty of time to collect and identify new species.19 Henry described Mengsi as “more a tribute to French vanity than anything else”, as there was very little trade.20 Henry wrote from Simao [Pu’er] in Yunnan that, “in such places as this letters are esteemed more than gold, more than tobacco – they are the only little joys we have.”21

  • 22 Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past.
  • 23 Fan, “Victorian Naturalists in China”.
  • 24 Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China, p. 75.

12Hans van de Ven notes that the CMCS was not straightforwardly an institution of British imperialism. He argues that the Customs consciously declined to align itself with British imperialism, and that it helped to sustain the Qing and Republican polities.22 However this liminal position is what makes the CMCS such an intriguing case for the study of colonial science. China’s continuing political autonomy meant that the Customs’ European staff were forced to negotiate their position carefully, with knock-on effects on botanical collecting. Botanical networks, as Fa-ti Fan has shown convincingly, were built on institutions of informal European empire in China.23 Fan suggests that the fact that the CMCS was a Chinese government body might have led Sir Robert Hart, the Inspector-General, to decline to offer much official assistance to Kew Gardens, in spite of the Kew Director’s requests.24

13The study of Augustine Henry’s practices, I suggest, sheds light on the relationship between science and informal empire in Yunnan in distinct and important ways, spanning first, the agency of collectors, second, the nature of the scientific networks in which they operated, and third, their motivations and the impact these motivations had on their collecting practices.

  • 25 Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago, Unive (...)

14First, studying Henry’s work brings to light plant collectors’ agency. Botanists at Kew relied on vast networks of collectors around the world sending them specimens. However, these collectors were not working for Kew exactly. Elite scientists at places like Kew had to negotiate, to give gifts and offer barter, in order to ensure the continued flow of specimens from collectors.25 Collectors like Henry were part of a network of unpaid labourers, who were not simply doing the bidding of masters at Kew in a hub-and-spoke model, but were instead autonomous actors. Henry frequently approached the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, William Turner Thiselton Dyer, for advice and recommendations. But he was free to ignore this advice too. For instance, Henry dismissed Thiselton Dyer’s attempts to encourage him to give up collecting for more intellectual study:

  • 26 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 5 September 1896.

Regarding what you say about my taking up a more intellectual field than collecting, it is in my mind. But really time is scarcely at my disposal to do much. Take six hours of official work out of the day, three or four for exercise and what is left? My collecting is my exercise, and it keeps me in health, bodily and mental, in these out of the way parts, where stagnation is the rule.26

  • 27 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 30 April 1897.
  • 28 RBG Kew, Henry to H.B. Morse, Mengsi, 7 March 1896.
  • 29 RBG Kew, Henry to H.B. Morse, Mengsi, 7 March 1896; emphasis in original.
  • 30 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Takow, 10 July 1896.

15However, Henry was perfectly willing to study on his own terms, when it suited him, for instance acquiring a camera and asking Thiselton Dyer for “some suggestions concerning the uses of photography in botany” in “some good scientific line”.27 Especially at first, his lack of botanical knowledge frustrated him and he tried to educate himself. When Henry first tried sending his collections to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and to the French National Museum of Natural History, they refused to accept the collections. He complained to his friend Morse about the fact that “at present neither [institution] will deal with specimens gathered at random.”28 But, he speculated, they might be interested in “small interesting collections”.29 A few months later, as he prepared to move to Yunnan, he approached Thiselton Dyer with an urgent request: “I wish for advice from you as soon as possible as regards collecting. Shall I aim at making a vast collection like the Hupeh one, say ten sets of everything? Or shall I confine myself to small collections of only interesting plants?”30

  • 31 Endersby, Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science, p. 17.
  • 32 Mark Harrison, “Science and the British Empire”, Isis 96:1 (2005), pp. 56-63.

16Henry was far from being anti-intellectual. Indeed, after he left China for the last time in 1900, he retrained and began a second career as a Professor of Forestry in Ireland. He was also full of theories to explain China’s biodiversity – an important problem for colonial science concerned with the possibilities of growing commercial crops in the colonies.31 Yet Henry preferred to study only when it interested him. As Mark Harrison has pointed out, historians sometimes dismiss colonial scientists as mere “fact gatherers”.32 There was an element of this, but collectors like Henry also exercised agency, seeking to educate themselves, just not always along the lines envisaged by their correspondents at Kew.

  • 33 David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie, “Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, T (...)
  • 34 Augustine Henry, Notes on Economic Botany of China (Shanghai, Presbyterian Mission Press, 1893), p. (...)
  • 35 Ibid., p. 11.
  • 36 Ibid., p. 26.

17A second theme that emerges from Henry’s work in China is that Kew was important but was far from being the only point of reference for Henry. Henry’s scientific world is clearly polycentric.33 He refers to the “Chinese authorities” – “Chinese authorities have apparently being [sic] ‘taken in’ in their description of the tree yielding the bark used in medicine, and have confused the Celtis and Magnolia”34 – as frequently as he refers to the “authorities at Kew”. Sometimes in frustration: “Chinese books of botany throw no light on this curious wood.”35 But more often he refers to Chinese and Japanese books to confirm his findings: “Li Shih-chen’s account points to Tulipa edulis, Baker, which is also the identification of the Japanese.”36 He was as likely to cite Chinese and Japanese “authorities”, though only rarely by name, as he was to cite European scholars and collectors like Pere David, Franchet, or Delavay.

  • 37 Ibid., p. 3.

18When Henry devised a scheme to recruit missionaries in the search for commercially useful species, he acted independently, and not merely as a “fact gatherer” working for Kew. In 1893, he wrote a series of articles in a Shanghai missionary newspaper calling for missionaries’ help in the search for useful plants. He began with the plea: “Missionaries and others living in the interior are often in a position to make inquiries concerning the natural production of China, the results of which would be of great service to science.” By “science”, Henry particularly meant economic botany. Since, he argued, “scarcely anything is known in regard to many points of economical interest, [please send] specimens of dried plants, drugs, woods, dyes, etc.”37

  • 38 Ibid.
  • 39 Ibid.

19He informed Kew about his idea to recruit missionaries as collectors, and the Director expressed support for his plans, saying “I am deeply interested in the work you [Henry] propose to take up as to Chinese vegetable products. You may rely on us cooperating with you con amore.”38 Thiselton-Dyer asked Henry to include a request on his behalf, stating “I am particularly interested in all applications of wood. [...] It would be very interesting to clear up the nature of the wood used by Chinese ladies for dressing their hair.”39 The aim of Thiselton-Dyer’s line of enquiry, Henry explained to the missionaries, was to find a replacement for the wood from the Caucasus used by wood engravers in Europe, which was in danger of exhaustion.

  • 40 Mabberley, “Wilson, Ernest Henry (1876–1930)”.
  • 41 Wilson, A Naturalist in Western China, p. viii.
  • 42 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 5 September 1896.
  • 43 Ibid.

20Henry also worked with multiple scientific and commercial institutions, not just Kew. He shared his specimens with French, American and Russian botanic gardens. In 1899, when Veitch nursery in Britain decided to send Ernest Henry Wilson to find the rare and much sought-after “handkerchief” tree, they sent him first to Charles Sprague Sargent in the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, where he learnt techniques for transporting plants. Sargent advised him once in China to go straight to Yunnan to see Henry, who had spotted the tree.40 Wilson later attributed the results of his work in China largely to Henry’s advice, as well as, he admitted, to the work of his Chinese collectors.41 On another occasion, Henry fielded queries directly from a British firm interested in commercial applications of Chinese plants. In 1896, soon after arriving in Mengsi, Henry reported that he had had enquiries from a London firm about soap-trees: “They wish to buy the fruits of these in quantity, as they have brought out some patent or other, which demands a large consumption of these fruits.”42 He promised to write an article for the Kew Bulletin on the subject of soap-trees, as it was “of perhaps considerable commercial importance”.43

21A third major theme that emerges from Henry’s work in China is the proliferation of the specimens he collected. Henry collaborated with other collectors to identify specimens, but he was also very interested in amassing the greatest number. His desire for the prestige which was attached to collectors who discovered the most species was an important motivator of his work.

  • 44 Henry to Thiselton Dyer, 30 April 1897, “A Budget from Yunnan”, Bulletin of Miscellaneous Informati (...)
  • 45 Bretschneider, History of European Botanical Discoveries in China, p. 776.
  • 46 Seamus O’Brien, In the Footsteps of Augustine Henry and his Chinese Plant Collectors (Woodbridge, S (...)
  • 47 Bretschneider, History of European Botanical Discoveries in China, p. 883.
  • 48 Ibid.

22Henry’s letters describe his losing battle to keep on top of his enormous and ever-growing collection of new specimens. He told Thiselton Dyer that he had numbered and labelled 660 distinct species, “without making a perceptible gap in the immense pile of bundles of dried plants”.44 The botanist and sinologist, Emil Bretschneider, reported in 1898 that a great part of Henry’s discoveries had still not been described.45 In total, Henry sent Kew 158,000 specimens, consisting of 6,000 species, of which more than 1,700 were new species.46 This is broadly comparable to the numbers sent by other collectors working in Yunnan at the time. Adrien Franchet, who received the dried specimens the French missionaries sent to the Paris National Museum of Natural History, also struggled to keep on top of their output.47 Franchet reported that Delavay sent over 4,000 species of plants, from more than 200,000 specimens, of which he estimated 1,500 to be entirely new species.48

  • 49 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 5 September 1896.
  • 50 Henry to Thiselton Dyer, c/o Customs Simao, 20th December 1898, in Bulletin of Miscellaneous Inform (...)

23One of Henry’s motivations to collect so many specimens was a competitive desire to discover more new species than his rivals, the French. Henry competed with Delavay, a French missionary, over who could collect the most new species. Henry wrote in 1896 that Delavay’s 3000 species would be hard to beat, but – with tongue in cheek – “one must try and eclipse a Frenchman”.49 Yunnan’s natural biodiversity therefore attracted Henry to working there in the first place, despite its reputation as a remote and lonely posting. He wrote from Mengsi that he hoped the “revolving wheel” of the Service might send him next to Teng-Yueh [Tengchong in western Yunnan]. He foresaw that Teng-Yueh would soon be getting a Custom House, but more importantly, its location in the high mountains meant that “there would be a chance of rivalling Delavay’s collections from the mountains near Tali [Dali]”.50 The spirit of this competition was always light-hearted however, as is seen from the fact that Henry frequently collaborated with his French fellow collectors, for instance sharing packets of seeds with the French Consul at Simao, and writing to Franchet at the Paris National Museum of Natural History to ask for papers on Yunnan botany.

  • 51 Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science.
  • 52 Lorraine Daston, “Type Specimens and Scientific Memory”, Critical Enquiry 31 (2004), pp. 153-182.
  • 53 Caroline Cornish and Felix Driver, “‘Specimens Distributed’: The Circulation of Objects from Kew’s (...)
  • 54 Lucas et al, “Colonial Pride and Metropolitan Expectations: The British Museum and Melbourne’s Mete (...)

24The question of the proliferation of specimens is an important one. The collecting and comparing of specimens is fundamental to botany as a science. Elite scientists relied on the flow of specimens gathered from around the world by unpaid collectors such as Henry.51 As the number of naturalists exploring the world increased, there was a corresponding increase in the numbers of specimens and species they found. It became increasingly difficult to prevent the proliferation of multiple names for the same species.52 The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew functioned as a sort of clearing-house, not only receiving massive quantities of specimens but also distributing them to other museums.53 In other contexts, scholars have shown how fraught the competition over specimens between metropole and colony could become, involving colonial pride and rivalry.54 Affect – collectors’ feelings of pride, competitiveness, loneliness – all had as much impact on the flow of specimens around the world as did the demands of science.

  • 55 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 29 November 1898.
  • 56 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Simao, 1 May 1899.

25In order to amass these great quantities of specimens, Henry depended on the labour and knowledge of local people in Yunnan. As Henry explained: “I am dependent, indeed, for the great richness of my collections on the excellent native, old Ho, who is working for me here as he did at Mengsi.”55 On the death of Ho, Henry admitted that “nearly all the good things in the Yunnan collection must be attributed to him”.56

Empire transplanted – popular gardening writing and the construction of the “temperate imagination”

26Nance Brunton, Henry’s wife Elsie’s sister, described the Henrys’ house in Dublin, to which they moved in 1913, in the following manner:

  • 57 Diary of Annie Brunton, cited in Clara Cullen (ed.), The World Upturning: Elsie Henry’s Irish Warti (...)

It was a little grey stone house with a buddleia which Augustine had brought back from his travels in China and introduced into Great Britain, growing in front.57

  • 58 Augustine Henry, “Midst Chinese Forests”, The Garden: An Illustrated Weekly Journal of Gardening in (...)

27Describing the story of how he became a plant collector, Henry wrote in The Garden weekly journal, “before going to China in 1881, I had no training in botany, and was quite ignorant of gardening”.58 Botanical collectors like Henry were gardeners as well as naturalists. Indeed, for them the two fields were closely interlinked. In time, Henry became a frequent contributor to such journals as The Garden and Gardener’s Chronicle, as well as more scientific journals such as the Kew Bulletin, American Druggist, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. It is important to see plant collectors like Henry not just through the lens of “colonial science” but also in the context of the surge in popular interest in gardening that took place in the last few decades of the 19th century. The late 19th century saw a boom in garden writing in Britain. Paying attention to how popular garden writers – both plant hunters and gardeners who did not travel – wrote about plants and plant collecting can tell us much about how people in Britain thought about empire, as well as how empire shaped British culture.

  • 59 See for instance David Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1 (...)
  • 60 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Simao, 8 June 1898.
  • 61 Kingdon Ward, The Romance of Plant-Hunting, p. 75.

28This section argues for the concept of a “temperate imagination”. There is a large literature on the imperial imagining of the tropics, but less on the imagining of the temperate zones, which were the foil to the tropical “Other”.59 The hardiness of China’s upland plants in a temperate climate helps explain why they were easily adopted in British gardens. But I would also argue that the British “temperate imagination” explains why Yunnanese plants were so readily accepted into the canon of British plants. Yunnan was not imagined in a tropical idiom but instead as a temperate, and consequently familiar and more pleasant, terrain. Henry wrote: “The difference between this shrub [...] and a rose expresses exactly the difference between sub-tropical and temperate vegetation. The latter is in some mysterious way much more beautiful and satisfactory to the eye.”60 The plant hunter Frank Kingdon Ward also preferred a temperate climate: “As we dive deeper into the pine forests of Yunnan, we leave the squealing jungle behind us, and the familiar call of the cuckoo, and the harsh cry of the pheasant, jar pleasantly on our ears.”61 This homely imagination of temperate regions enabled popular gardening writers to cultivate an image of empire as something familiar, making it easier to incorporate Yunnan’s plants into the canon of “natural” British plants.

  • 62 Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, “John Bull’s Other Vineyard: Selling Australian Wine in Nineteenth-Century (...)
  • 63 Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-class Families in England, 1850-191 (...)

29Studies of imperial commodities have gained attention as ways for historians to reflect on the metropolitan encounter with empire at home.62 The study of plants as a similar commodity deserves more attention. Analysis of Victorian material culture that focuses, for instance, on the home, often discusses the ornaments, paintings, carpets and curtains that were crammed into rooms, but overlook the flowers and ferns that were invading the house.63 This section argues for the importance of plants in the study of colonial culture, as living things which could bring whole exotic landscapes to life, or be incorporated into the “natural” domestic landscape.

  • 64 George Glenny, Gardening for the Million: an Amateurs’ and Cottagers’ Guide (London, Houlston & Sto (...)

30The late 19th and early 20th centuries were the heyday of garden writing. Social changes brought gardening within the reach of ordinary people. Penny gardening manuals were published containing advice for cottage gardeners and for people who had recently moved out from the cities to the suburbs and had never gardened before.64 At the same time gardeners like William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll, and Vita Sackville-West published numerous books about gardening for popular audiences. Plant hunters themselves were also prolific authors. Frank Kingdon-Ward wrote twenty-five books, Ernest Henry Wilson and Reginald Farrer at least sixteen and nineteen respectively.

  • 65 E. Charles Nelson, “William Robinson, (1838-1935), horticulturalist and publisher”, Oxford Dictiona (...)
  • 66 William Robinson, The English Flower Garden: Style, Position and Arrangement (London, John Murray, (...)
  • 67 Robinson, The English Flower Garden, p. 93.
  • 68 Ibid., p. xxx.
  • 69 William Robinson, The Wild Garden, or, Our Groves and Shrubberies Made Beautiful by the Naturalisat (...)

31One of the most widely read and influential of the garden writers was William Robinson. His 1883 book, The English Flower Garden, appeared in fifteen editions in his lifetime and he has been called the “father” of the English flower garden.65 Robinson led the late 19th century turn towards cultivating “natural” temperate plants.66 He inveighed against the mid-century fashion for planting exotic sub-tropical plants: “About a generation ago a taste began to be manifested for placing a number of tender plants in the open air in summer, with a view to the production of showy masses of decided colour.”67 He condemned this “gaudy” fashion, writing that no amount of expense and “expenditure of glass” will make up for a “lack of true taste”.68 He advocated instead for a turn to “wild gardening”. Influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement, he urged British gardeners to aim for a more rustic, “natural” look by incorporating hardy foreign plants into British gardens. His book, The Wild Garden, is subtitled: Our Groves and Shrubberies Made Beautiful by the Naturalisation of Hardy Exotic Plants.69

32This movement to “naturalise” exotic plants was therefore a way of bringing empire home to the amateur gardener. Robinson folds India into his description of springtime in England, when he writes:

  • 70 Robinson, The English Flower Garden, p. 83.

Spring comes to us wreathed in Honeysuckle, and summer brings the Wild Rose and the May bloom, and these are but messengers of a host of lovely shrubs and low trees of the hills and plains of northern and temperate regions, and also of the high mountains of countries like India, where there are vast Alpine regions with shrubs as hardy as our own, as we see in the case of the white Clematis that covers many an English cottage wall with its fair white bloom.70

  • 71 See for instance Eugenia W. Herbert, Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India, (Philadelphia, Unive (...)
  • 72 Setsu Tachibana, Stephen Daniels and Charles Watkins, “Japanese Gardens in Edwardian Britain: Lands (...)
  • 73 Kingdon Ward, The Romance of Plant-Hunting, p. 4.
  • 74 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Simao, 19 September 1899.

33He frames the book in terms of empire too, extolling empire’s role in the global spread of English flower gardens. The epigraph to his The English Flower Garden is a quote from Count Fritz Hochberg’s book, An Eastern Voyage: “It’s delightful to see how English people have carried their artistic sense and flower gardens into their colonies and settlements.” This connects with the ways in which historians have studied how the British created pleasure gardens in all the colonies, from the hill stations of India to the rocky deserts of Aden.71 Robinson similarly saw empire as a two-way street, with imperial core and periphery influencing each other, and gardening fashions and plants going in both directions. Gardens were a contact zone between Britain and the world.72 This influence went in both directions – just as foreign plants and fashions came to Britain, the English also brought their love of gardening to the colonies. As Kingdon Ward proudly asserted, “Every Englishman who has a home of his own, has a garden, be it only a yard; otherwise he has a window box, or at least a pot plant on his mantelpiece. […] Even the exile on the frontiers of the Empire cultivates roses; flaring Cannas brighten his compound, under the heavy shade of the Banyan.”73 When in 1899, Henry asked Thiselton Dyer to send some Lilium henryi bulbs from Kew to Henry’s sister in India, he was demonstrating just how closely gardening, plant collecting and empire were interlinked.74

  • 75 E.A. Bowles, My Garden in Spring (London, T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1914), p. 19.
  • 76 Vita Sackville-West, Let Us Now Praise Famous Gardens (London, Penguin, 2009), [first published 195 (...)

34The foreign origins of these plants were not forgotten. Indeed, around this time there was a fashion for arranging the plants in one’s garden according to their continent or country of origin. “One of the finest collections of trees and shrubs to be found in any private garden in England is arranged by grouping them according to their native continents or the larger countries, such as China.”75 Occasionally, this fad could be taken too far, and an effort to “reproduce” entire foreign landscapes could look tasteless, in the opinion of another author. Referring to the long-running rage for rock gardens, Vita Sackville-West wrote, “there is something to be said for rock gardening so long as you do it tactfully and do not pretend to be reproducing a bit of the Alps or the Himalayas or one of the more remote valleys of China where they were never intended to occur.”76

  • 77 Vita Sackville-West, Some Flowers (London, Pavilion Books, 1996), [first published 1937], p. 55.

35Yet while their non-native origins were not forgotten, these plants – frequently anthropomorphised – were seen to have made themselves “at home” in English gardens. Sackville-West, the author just mentioned above for her criticism of gardeners’ attempts at reproducing foreign landscapes, described one species of rose, Rosa moyesii, which E.H. Wilson had introduced from China in 1894, as follows: “This is a Chinese rose, and looks it. We might well expect to meet her on a Chinese printed paper-lining to a tea-chest of the time of Charles II […] Instead, we meet her more often springing out of our English lawns, or overhanging our English streams, yet Rosa moyesii remains for ever China. With that strange adaptability of true genius she never looks out of place. She adapts herself as happily to cosy England as to the rocks and highlands of Asia”.77 Plants, therefore, were a contact zone between Britain and the world. Through the “temperate imagination”, hardy plants from China and elsewhere were imagined as making themselves at home in Britain.

Conclusion

36First, this article has reflected on some of the insights into colonial science that can be gained from the context of informal empire. As a Customs official who botanised in his spare time, Augustine Henry was typical of many in the vast network of collectors who maintained the flow of specimens on which colonial science, and indeed the British empire’s pretence to categorise and “know” the world, depended. Yet he also exemplified some of the tensions within this network. He acted for himself rather than for the Director of Kew Gardens, for instance, on occasion rejecting Thiselton Dyer’s advice and also organising his own networks of collectors in China. His mental map of science was clearly “polycentric”, referring to Chinese, Japanese, French and American as well as British “authorities”. And, indeed, he was as likely to contribute to Gardeners’ Chronicle as he was to the Kew Bulletin. This article has thus situated him in the context both of colonial science and of the world of popular gardening, which he saw as closely related.

  • 78 Robinson, The English Flower Garden, p. 83.

37This article has also introduced the idea of a “temperate imagination” to show how hardy plants, including those from the inland provinces of China, were readily accepted into the canon of “natural” British garden plants. Contrary to the image of the tropics, which were imagined as alien, “Other” and uncivilised, temperate regions were seen as civilised, pleasant and domestic. Popular gardening writers like William Robinson used this temperate imagination to cultivate an image of empire as something homely and familiar, erasing the distance in the imagination between “many an English cottage” and the “vast Alpine regions” of India.78 The “temperate imagination” was a way for gardening writers to bring empire home in the minds – and gardens – of readers in Britain.

38At a time when people are re-examining the colonial connections of art and artefacts in museums, it is not a stretch to say that we should look again at the colonial origins of the plants in British gardens. In their search for “ornamental and useful” plants, amateurs like Henry collected with half an eye to British amateur gardeners’ tastes and half an eye to colonial science. These collectors brought home plants which functioned as a “contact zone” between Britain and the empire. Through a “temperate imagination”, these garden plants brought the empire home in the minds of British amateur gardeners. Plants thus form a hitherto overlooked part of the material culture of empire, a means by which amateur collectors in China and amateur gardeners in the metropolis incorporated material artefacts of empire into metropolitan homes and gardens.

Top of page

Bibliography

Allan, Mea, William Robinson, 1838-1935: Father of the English Flower Garden (London, Faber & Faber, 1982).

Anderson, John, A Report on the Expedition to Western Yunnan via Bhamo (Calcutta, Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1871).

Arnold, David, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800-1856 (Delhi, Permanent Black, 2005).

Arnold, David, “‘Illusory Riches’: Representations of the Tropical World, 1840-1950”, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21:1 (2000), pp. 6-18.

Baber, Zaheer, “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge”, Journal of Contemporary Asia 46:4 (2016), pp. 659-679.

Bickers, Robert, “Revisiting the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854-1950”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36:2 (2008), pp. 221-226.

Bickers, Robert, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire (London, Allan Lane, 2011).

Bowles, E.A., My Garden in Spring (London, T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1914).

Bretschneider, Emil, History of European Botanical Discoveries in China, Vol. II (London, Sampston, Low, Marsh & Co., 1898).

Brockway, Lucile H., “Plant Science and Colonial Expansion: The Botanical Chess Game” in Jack R. Kloppenburg Jr. (ed.), Seeds and Sovereignty: The Use and Control of Plant Genetic Resources (Durham, Duke University Press, 1988), pp. 49-66.

Brockway, Lucile H., Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002).

Cornish, Caroline, and Felix Driver, “‘Specimens Distributed’: The Circulation of Objects from Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany, 1847–1914”, Journal of the History of Collections 32:2 (2020) pp. 327-340.

Cox, E.H.M., Plant-Hunting in China: A History of Botanical Exploration in China and the Tibetan Marches (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986) [first published, London, Collins, 1945].

Cullen, Clara, (ed.), The World Upturning: Elsie Henry’s Irish Wartime Diaries, 1913-1919, (Dublin, Merrion, 2013).

Daston, Lorraine, “Type Specimens and Scientific Memory”, Critical Enquiry 31 (2004), pp. 153-182.

Drayton, Richard, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000).

Driver, Felix, and Brenda SA Yeoh, “Constructing the Tropics: Introduction”, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21:1 (2000), pp. 1-5.

Dubald, Déborah and Catarina Madruga, “Introduction. Situated Nature: Field Collecting and Local Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century”, Journal for the History of Knowledge 3:1 (2022), pp. 1-11.

Endersby, Jim, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Fan, Fa-ti, “Victorian Naturalists in China: Science and Informal Empire”, British Journal for the History of Science 36:1 (2003), pp. 1-26.

Fan, Fa-ti, “Science in a Chinese Entrepôt: British Naturalists and Their Chinese Associates in Old Canton”, Osiris 2:18 (2003), pp. 60-78.

Forman, Ross G., China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Gardening for the Many: Being Practical Monthly Directions for the Cultivation, Step by Step, of each Crop in the Garden of the Amateur and Cottager (London, Cottage Gardener Office, 1854).

Glenny, George, Gardening for the Million: an Amateurs’ and Cottagers’ Guide (London, Houlston & Stoneman, 1849).

de Groot, Joanna, “Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections: Reflections on Consumption and Empire” in Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 166–190.

Hamilton, Alan, “Blue Blood, Green Fingers”, The Times (London), 23rd May 1988.

Hamlett, Jane, Material Relations: Domestic interiors and middle-class families in England, 1850-1910 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010).

Hall, Catherine, and Sonya Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Healey, Ben, The Plant Hunters, (New York, Scribner, 1975).

Henry, Augustine, Notes on Economic Botany of China (Shanghai, Presbyterian Mission Press, 1893).

Henry, Augustine, “Midst Chinese Forests”, The Garden: An Illustrated Weekly Journal of Gardening in All its Forms, 4 January 1902.

Herbert, Eugenia W., Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India, (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

Hevia, James, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 2004).

Kingdon Ward, Frank, The Romance of Plant-Hunting (London, Edward Arnold & Co., 1924).

Lancaster, Roy, Travels in China: A Plantsman’s Paradise (Suffolk, Antique Collectors’ Club, 1989).

Livingstone, David N., “Race, Space and Moral Climatology: Notes Toward a Genealogy”, Journal of Historical Geography 28: 2 (2002), pp. 159–180.

Loeb, Lori Anne, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994).

Lucas et al, “Colonial Pride and Metropolitan Expectations: The British Museum and Melbourne’s Meteorites”, The British Journal for the History of Science 27:1 (1994), pp. 65-87.

Lyte, Charles, The Plant Hunters (London, Orbis, 1983).

MacLeod, Roy, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis’: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science”, Historical Records of Australian Science 5:3 (1982), p. 1-16.

Mommsen, Wolfgang J., and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities (London, Allen & Unwin, 1986).

Mueggler, Erik, “‘The Lapponicum Sea’: Matter, Sense, and Affect in the Botanical Exploration of Southwest China and Tibet”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 47:3 (2005), pp. 442-479.

Nair, Savithri Preetha, “Science and the Politics of Colonial Collecting: The Case of Indian Meteorites, 1856–70”, The British Journal for the History of Science 39:1 (2006), pp. 97-119.

Nelson, E. Charles, “William Robinson, (1838-1935), horticulturalist and publisher”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.

Nye, Joseph S., “Soft Power: The Evolution of a Concept”, Journal of Political Power 14:1 (2 January 2021), pp. 196–208.

O’Brien, Seamus, In the Footsteps of Augustine Henry and his Chinese Plant Collectors (Woodbridge, Suffolk, Garden Art Press, 2011).

Osterhammel, Jürgen, “Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, (London, Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 290–314.

Porter, Roy, “Gentlemen and Geology: The Emergence of a Scientific Career, 1660-1920”, The Historical Journal 21:4 (1978), pp. 809-836.

Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, Routledge, 1992).

Quest-Ritson, Charles, The English Garden: A Social History (London, Viking, 2001).

Mabberley, D.J., “Wilson, Ernest Henry (1876–1930)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004).

Regan-Lefebvre, Jennifer, “John Bull’s Other Vineyard: Selling Australian Wine in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45:2 (2017), pp. 259-283.

Report of the Director of the Botanical Survey of India for the Year 1910-11, Calcutta: Botanical Survey of India, 1911.

Richards, Thomas, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (London, Verso, 1990).

Robinson, William, The Wild Garden, or, Our Groves and Shrubberies Made Beautiful by the Naturalisation of Hardy Exotic Plants (London, John Murray, 1870).

Robinson, William, The English Flower Garden: Style, Position and Arrangement (London, John Murray, 1889).

Sackville-West, Vita, Let Us Now Praise Famous Gardens (London, Penguin, 2009), [first published 1951].

Sackville-West, Vita, Some Flowers (London, Pavilion Books, 1996), [first published 1937].

Wilson, Ernest Henry, A Naturalist in Western China with Vasculum, Camera and Gun, 2 vols (London, Methuen & Co., 1913).

Secord, James, “Knowledge in Transit”, Isis 95 (2004), pp. 654-672.

van de Ven, Hans, “Robert Hart and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service”, Modern Asian Studies 40:3 (2006), pp. 545-548.

van de Ven, Hans, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (New York, Columbia University Press, 2014).

Van Dyke, Paul A., The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700-1845 (Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2005).

Top of page

Notes

1 Alan Hamilton, “Blue blood, green fingers”, The Times (London), 23 May 1988.

2 Report of the Director of the Botanical Survey of India for the Year 1910-11, Calcutta: Botanical Survey of India, 1911.

3 D. J. Mabberley, “Wilson, Ernest Henry (1876–1930)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004).

4 See for instance Erik Mueggler, “‘The Lapponicum Sea’: Matter, Sense, and Affect in the Botanical Exploration of Southwest China and Tibet”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 47:3 (2005), pp. 442-479; Charles Lyte, The Plant Hunters (London, Orbis, 1983); Déborah Dubald and Catarina Madruga, “Introduction. Situated Nature: Field Collecting and Local Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century”, Journal for the History of Knowledge 3:1 (2022), pp. 1-11.

5 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, Routledge, 1992).

6 Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002); Lucile H. Brockway, “Plant Science and Colonial Expansion: The Botanical Chess Game” in Jack R. Kloppenburg Jr. (ed.), Seeds and Sovereignty: The Use and Control of Plant Genetic Resources, (Durham, Duke University Press, 1988), p. 50; Zaheer Baber, “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge”, Journal of Contemporary Asia 46:4 (2016), pp. 659-679; Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000).

7 Jürgen Osterhammel, “Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, (London, Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 290–314.

8 James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 2004); Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire (London, Allan Lane, 2011).

9 Augustine Henry, “Midst Chinese Forests”, The Garden: An Illustrated Weekly Journal of Gardening in All its Forms, 4 January 1902.

10 Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 27.

11 Paul A. Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700-1845 (Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2005).

12 Roy Lancaster, Travels in China: A Plantsman’s Paradise (Suffolk, Antique Collectors’ Club, 1989), p. 24.

13 British Library, Sladen Papers, MSS Eur. E290/6; John Anderson, A Report on the Expedition to Western Yunnan via Bhamo (Calcutta, Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1871).

14 Emil Bretschneider, History of European Botanical Discoveries in China, Vol. II (London, Sampston, Low, Marsh & Co., 1898), p. 772.

15 Robert Bickers, “Revisiting the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854-1950”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36:2 (2008); Hans van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (New York, Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 3.

16 Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past.

17 Hans van de Ven, “Robert Hart and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service”, Modern Asian Studies 40:3 (2006), p. 548.

18 Fa-ti Fan, “Victorian Naturalists in China: Science and Informal Empire”, British Journal for the History of Science 36:1 (2003), pp. 1-26, p. 12.

19 Bretschneider, History of European Botanical Discoveries in China, p. 774; Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (hereafter RBG Kew), Augustine Henry to William Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 16 May 1896.

20 RBG Kew, DC 151, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 16 May 1896.

21 Henry to Thiselton Dyer, c/o Customs Simao, 8 June 1898, in Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information, Royal Gardens, Kew 143 (1898), p. 297.

22 Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past.

23 Fan, “Victorian Naturalists in China”.

24 Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China, p. 75.

25 Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 3.

26 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 5 September 1896.

27 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 30 April 1897.

28 RBG Kew, Henry to H.B. Morse, Mengsi, 7 March 1896.

29 RBG Kew, Henry to H.B. Morse, Mengsi, 7 March 1896; emphasis in original.

30 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Takow, 10 July 1896.

31 Endersby, Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science, p. 17.

32 Mark Harrison, “Science and the British Empire”, Isis 96:1 (2005), pp. 56-63.

33 David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie, “Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge”, Osiris 15 (2000), pp. 221-40; Roy MacLeod, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis’: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science”, Historical Records of Australian Science 5:3 (1982), pp. 1-16; James Secord, “Knowledge in Transit”, Isis 95 (2004), pp. 654-672.

34 Augustine Henry, Notes on Economic Botany of China (Shanghai, Presbyterian Mission Press, 1893), p. 28.

35 Ibid., p. 11.

36 Ibid., p. 26.

37 Ibid., p. 3.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Mabberley, “Wilson, Ernest Henry (1876–1930)”.

41 Wilson, A Naturalist in Western China, p. viii.

42 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 5 September 1896.

43 Ibid.

44 Henry to Thiselton Dyer, 30 April 1897, “A Budget from Yunnan”, Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information, Royal Gardens, Kew 132 (December 1897), p. 407.

45 Bretschneider, History of European Botanical Discoveries in China, p. 776.

46 Seamus O’Brien, In the Footsteps of Augustine Henry and his Chinese Plant Collectors (Woodbridge, Suffolk, Garden Art Press, 2011), p. 16.

47 Bretschneider, History of European Botanical Discoveries in China, p. 883.

48 Ibid.

49 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 5 September 1896.

50 Henry to Thiselton Dyer, c/o Customs Simao, 20th December 1898, in Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information, Royal Gardens, Kew 147-148 (1899), p. 49.

51 Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science.

52 Lorraine Daston, “Type Specimens and Scientific Memory”, Critical Enquiry 31 (2004), pp. 153-182.

53 Caroline Cornish and Felix Driver, “‘Specimens Distributed’: The Circulation of Objects from Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany, 1847–1914”, Journal of the History of Collections 32:2 (2020) pp. 327-340.

54 Lucas et al, “Colonial Pride and Metropolitan Expectations: The British Museum and Melbourne’s Meteorites”, The British Journal for the History of Science 27:1 (1994), pp. 65-87; Savithri Preetha Nair, “Science and the Politics of Colonial Collecting: The Case of Indian Meteorites, 1856–70”, The British Journal for the History of Science 39:1 (2006), pp. 97-119.

55 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Mengsi, 29 November 1898.

56 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Simao, 1 May 1899.

57 Diary of Annie Brunton, cited in Clara Cullen (ed.), The World Upturning: Elsie Henry’s Irish Wartime Diaries, 1913-1919 (Dublin, Merrion, 2013), p. 2.

58 Augustine Henry, “Midst Chinese Forests”, The Garden: An Illustrated Weekly Journal of Gardening in All its Forms, 4 January 1902.

59 See for instance David Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800-1856 (Delhi, Permanent Black, 2005); David Arnold, “‘Illusory Riches’: Representations of the Tropical World, 1840-1950”, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21:1 (2000), pp. 6-18; Felix Driver and Brenda SA Yeoh, “Constructing the Tropics: Introduction”, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21:1 (2000), pp. 1-5; Ross G. Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013).

60 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Simao, 8 June 1898.

61 Kingdon Ward, The Romance of Plant-Hunting, p. 75.

62 Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, “John Bull’s Other Vineyard: Selling Australian Wine in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45:2 (2017), pp. 259-283; Joanna de Groot, “Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections: Reflections on Consumption and Empire” in Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 166–190.

63 Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-class Families in England, 1850-1910 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010); Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994).

64 George Glenny, Gardening for the Million: an Amateurs’ and Cottagers’ Guide (London, Houlston & Stoneman, 1849); Gardening for the Many: Being Practical Monthly Directions for the Cultivation, Step by Step, of each Crop in the Garden of the Amateur and Cottager (London, Cottage Gardener Office, 1854).

65 E. Charles Nelson, “William Robinson, (1838-1935), horticulturalist and publisher”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

66 William Robinson, The English Flower Garden: Style, Position and Arrangement (London, John Murray, 1889), p. v; Mea Allan, William Robinson, 1838-1935: Father of the English Flower Garden (London, Faber & Faber, 1982), p. 137.

67 Robinson, The English Flower Garden, p. 93.

68 Ibid., p. xxx.

69 William Robinson, The Wild Garden, or, Our Groves and Shrubberies Made Beautiful by the Naturalisation of Hardy Exotic Plants (London, John Murray, 1870).

70 Robinson, The English Flower Garden, p. 83.

71 See for instance Eugenia W. Herbert, Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India, (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

72 Setsu Tachibana, Stephen Daniels and Charles Watkins, “Japanese Gardens in Edwardian Britain: Landscape and Transculturation”, Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004), p. 365.

73 Kingdon Ward, The Romance of Plant-Hunting, p. 4.

74 RBG Kew, Henry to Thiselton Dyer, Simao, 19 September 1899.

75 E.A. Bowles, My Garden in Spring (London, T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1914), p. 19.

76 Vita Sackville-West, Let Us Now Praise Famous Gardens (London, Penguin, 2009), [first published 1951], p. 85.

77 Vita Sackville-West, Some Flowers (London, Pavilion Books, 1996), [first published 1937], p. 55.

78 Robinson, The English Flower Garden, p. 83.

Top of page

References

Electronic reference

Frances O’Morchoe, “Botany, Informal Empire and the Colonial Roots of British Gardens”Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXIX-1 | 2024, Online since 29 March 2024, connection on 14 December 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/11532; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.11532

Top of page

About the author

Frances O’Morchoe

Frances O’Morchoe is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in History at Yale University. She received her DPhil in History from the University of Oxford in 2019. From 2019 to 2021 she lectured in history at Parami University in Yangon, Myanmar. Her current research concerns the history of sovereignty, state formation and borderlands in Burma/Myanmar.

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search