The Dominion of Flowers

Botanical Art and Global Plant Relations

Mark Laird

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Hardback

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English

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
27 November 2024

History of art & design styles: c 1600 to c 1800; History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900; Botanical art; Gardening: plants

How a wave of exotic botanical imports from across Britain's empire shaped its gardens and psyche

Between 1760 and 1840, exotic plants were imported from across Britain's empire and were lavishly depicted in periodicals and scientific treatises as specimens collected alongside other objects of natural history. Mark Laird's provocative new book—part art history, part polemic—weaves fine art, botanical illustration, and previously unpublished archival material into a political and ethical account of Britain's heritage, showing how plants were not only integral to English gardens of the Georgian and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 Pulteney's catalogue of Dorset's native wildflowers. It then moves to the German artist John Miller and his illustrations for Lord Bute's Botanical Tables and concludes by tracing Britain's fascination with New Zealand's unique flora, first depicted in Mary Delany's collages.

Copiously illustrated with almost two hundred works, and drawing on Laird's genealogical research into his own family's colonial past, this volume foregrounds Indigenous ideas about ""plant relations"" in a study that brings the trans-oceanic movement of plants and people alive.

By: Mark Laird
Imprint: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 221mm, Width: 244mm,
ISBN: 9781913107451
ISBN 10: 1913107450
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 27 November 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Mark Laird is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and former faculty member at Harvard University. He is the author of The Flowering of the Landscape Garden and A Natural History of English Gardening—recipient of an Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award. He has been historic planting consultant to Painshill Park Trust, English Heritage, and Strawberry Hill Trust.

Reviews for The Dominion of Flowers: Botanical Art and Global Plant Relations

“Every sentence offers a thought for consideration.”—Charles Quest-Ritson, Country Life ""The book provides an expert insight into the role of botanical illustration and its political, ethical, ethnological and horticultural ramifications. It is highly recommended.""— John Edmondson, Garden History