The Garden History Blog

Ferdinand of Spain watching Columbus land in the Indies , from Guliano Dati’s Lettera, 1493

One part of garden history as a discipline that sometimes gets overlooked is the history of landscape in its widest sense, so today  I’m turning my attention to the way that Europeans saw and recorded new landscapes when they started exploring the rest of the world.

We know that early adventurers such as Columbus  were fascinated by plants, animals, the natural resources and the people of the so-called New Worlds.  They collected them & transported them home and distributed them  widely but surprisingly they appear to have taken very little interest  in the landscapes of the places they visited, or if they did,  seem to have done  very little to record or represent it pictorially.    

Why ever not?

Terra Bimene – thought to be Florida from the Miller Atlas, 1519

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From The Poetical Works of Erasmus Darwin, 1806 edition, shoeing some of Linnaeus’s 

Towards the end of the 18thc botany had become  a fashionable subject amongst the educated class in Britain, and in particular it was thought the study of plants was a suitably feminine pastime. So when Erasmus Darwin  (who I wrote about last week] decided to try and popularise Linnaeus’s new system of plant classification he had a big problem.  Linnaeus claimed that plants had sex,  so how could Darwin explain that without shocking his readership? Believe it or not he decided to do it in verse.

What followed was  a 4,000 line poem about the sex-life of plants with racy [for the time] language and imagery which made him the most famous poet of his day. Written in two parts  The Loves of the Plants [1789] and The Economy of Vegetation it was then republished in 1791 as The Botanic Garden.   

But there’s more to it than just plants ….

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Erasmus Darwin, from The Temple of Flora, by Robert Thornton, 1810

We’re all heard of Charles Darwin, and indeed the last couple of blogs have been about one impact of his ideas on evolution, but who knows much about his grandfather?

I certainly didn’t until I chanced across something he’d written which made me think I ought to find out a bit more about him. Somewhat to my surprise  I discovered  that he was  at least as multi-talented as the more famous Charles and, in his own way, almost as important.

Erasmus Darwin  was not only a man of extraordinary intellectual insight with his own pioneering ideas on evolution, he was a successful doctor, an inventor, a “lunartick” scientist, gardener, botanist and   later in life he became the most famous poet of his day.  Often accused of atheism he also had radical views  neither of which was  a good idea during the wars with revolutionary France at the very end of the 18thc.

The result has been that  for the last 150 years he has largely been overshadowed his grandson, and, I think,  unfairly so.

Darwin’s visiting card

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The cover of Amazing Stories, Sept 1927

The man-eating tree from Madagascar I wrote about last week turned out to be an elaborate hoax, albeit a very long lasting and successful one. Nevertheless it struck a chord in the public imagination and from then on there has been a constant stream of stories about weird plants gobbling up humans from all round the world.

From Amazing Man, Oct 1939

But is  a man-eating plant or a sentient plant capable of moving actually even theoretically possible?  Although the science says pretty clearly “no”,  quite a lot of people seem to have think it is… if only in their imagination!

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Cover of a new edition of Madagascar –             more about the book below!

Let’s get the New Year off to a scary flying start with a look at monstrous even man-eating plants.  There have always been strange or mythical plants but from the second half of the 19thc they take on new and often terrifying forms, especially in fiction.

What caused this fascination with  hostile or mutant  plants ? The answer seems to be the pioneering scientific work about evolution by none other than Charles Darwin.   That might seem like a strange claim but read on to find out more…  and to discover why, even if unwittingly, Darwin started a whole new genre of plant-related fiction which started with the Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar!   But everything is not always as it seems as you’ll see if you read on…

Sundew – Drosera 

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