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The expansion of the British and Dutch mercantile empires from the 17th century was accompanied by a renewal of the old Babylonian concept of Imperial Botany, now made all the more effective by a new marriage of private commerce with state power and scientific knowledge. By the 18th century, and largely thanks to agrarian entrepreneurs such as Townshend, Coke, and Tull, Britain was undergoing an agricultural revolution that would underpin the later industrial revolution and consequent population growth. Botany became all the rage in court circles across Europe, from Vienna to Madrid. Botanical gardens established throughout the Anglo-Dutch empires simultaneously served economic, scientific, and aesthetic purposes. Crops such as sugar, tea, coffee, and cocoa served both as stimuli for expansion and lucrative products for the maturing empires. Greater understanding of the mechanisms of plant reproduction enabled breeders to experiment with new hybrids and mutations in order to enhance crop variation.

This chapter examines forms of speech involved in interactions with the islands’ plant life. It investigates how plants were talked about, who was part of those exchanges, what was at stake in that talk, and how that changed over time. In particular, it examines the relationship between European natural history and the knowledge of Caribbean flora developed by the enslaved. Three ways of talking are identified. ‘Botanical prescription’ is outlined as a way of discussing the uses of plants in medicine that is rooted in the healer-patient dialogue in the sickroom. ‘Botanical conversation’ communicates forms of botanical and horticultural knowledge about plant classification and acclimatization, and was shared among gentlemanly networks – both on the islands and across the Atlantic world – and located in the plantation gardens from which plants and knowledge were exchanged. Finally, ‘botanic oration’ involved public forms of speech about botany in the Age of Abolition, which sought a new imperial role for the sugar islands, and involved the establishment of botanical gardens as privileged spaces of knowledge. It is argued that only the first of these opens a space for the voices of the enslaved, a space that was gradually shut down over the period.

Chapter Eight shifts gears to consider how publics are engaged by the gardens. This chapter shows how people varyingly interact with and respond to botanical knowledge as they encounter plants along branching garden paths. But it also examines important sites that are not open to the public—seedbanks, crucial sites for discussions of biodiversity but that also challenge our basic understandings of gardens.

One of the largest Suzhou-style scholar's gardens outside China opened in the San Gabriel Valley in 2008, at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. The project brought together diverse donors, scholars, and landscape architects in a complex transnational collaboration. This chapter discusses the social process and context in which this garden emerged at the Huntington. It suggests that the process surrounding the replication of this type of garden at the Huntington reflects the increasing power, status, and wealth of a segment of the Chinese American and Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants in Southern California, the rise of China as a global power, and the acknowledgment by a dominant cultural institution that it can no longer continue to ignore and exclude significant members of the region or the possible philanthropic contributions they bring.

During the lead-up to the Spanish-American War, U.S. botanists looked with envy at the progress of European scientists, who had access to tropical colonies. They pushed for the creation of their own “American tropical laboratory.” Chapter 1 traces the origins of the U.S. tropical laboratory movement; the resulting rental of the station at Cinchona, Jamaica; and the first decade of research there by members of the founding generation of U.S. ecologists. This history reveals their range of motivations for engaging in tropical research, from the 1890s through the outbreak of World War I and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The study of tropical organisms—with their diversity of forms and adaptations so foreign to those familiar with temperate flora and fauna—seemed to offer a path to a truly general understanding of living things. At the same time, U.S. botanists saw tropical research as the key to a place on the international scientific stage. U.S. botanists did not wait for state­sponsored colonial science. Driven by a distinct set of intellectual, cultural, and professional concerns, they were ready to filibuster for science to acquire an outpost for research in the Caribbean.

This chapter examines four programs where public gardens have contributed horticultural and ecological expertise to partnerships for the management of public landscapes and to increase public access to nature. In collaboration with other community institutions, the Missouri Botanical Garden, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, and Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens have assumed a range of roles, including those of community convener, technical expert, and innovator, as part of initiatives that support the environmental health of their communities. The initiatives investigated in this chapter demonstrate that efforts to improve a community's environmental conditions must recognize the importance of understanding what the natural environment means locally and that a community has more than one story about its relationship to the natural environment. A community's history and the experiences of all its residents influence the perceived relevance of the natural environment, and the ways in which people conceptualize the need for and potential benefits of green space. In the cases of Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond and the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, these environmental initiatives succeeded when they met their respective communities where they were, both physically and experientially. The chapter reveals an overarching recognition that partners and community stakeholders cannot “buy into” an environmental vision or initiative if they do not understand it.

Chapter Six offers tours of the three gardens’ living collections, as well as discussions with taxonomists about how they decide what plants to display and how they organize their field collecting projects. Their representational challenges are immense—in the field and in the garden—and these botanists are well-aware they contend with a public whose attention is notoriously limited and generally not oriented towards encountering vegetative life forms.

In 1874, Cameron left England for Ceylon, and two years later, when the painter Marianne North visited her, both women produced works of art in each other’s presence that expressed cultural displacement and embedded political commentaries on exoticism, cultural inferiority, and dependence. The final chapter examines the work of both artists in relation to their confrontation with colonialism. Cameron’s imagery is examined as both a ‘return to origins’ and an act of redemption. Cameron’s photograph depicting Marianne North looking up from reading George Eliot’s recently serialized novel, Daniel Deronda, is analysed in depth, arguing that the photographer included this book in her portrait of North as an important symbol because of the significance of Eliot’s work, which helps to ground the two women in place and time, as well as mark the colonialists’ conflict in larger terms. Eliot’s book is connected to Cameron’s photography, in which the search for a mythic return to origins is measured by the artists’ effort to reclaim a ‘lost’ and foreign land, all in view of extending the nation’s borders on the political map as an act of redemption.

This chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine Southern California gardens through a migration lens. It argues that we cannot understand these gardens without acknowledging that nearly all the plants, the people, and the water in Southern California have come from elsewhere. The book underscores the sociological implications of migration and gardens, unearthing social, cultural, and economic consequences of Southern California gardens. It shares what the author has learned in her study of paid immigrant gardeners in suburban residential gardens; urban community gardens in some of the poorest, most densely populated neighborhoods of Los Angeles; and the most elite botanical garden in the West. The remainder of the chapter sketches three claims that frame the present study; discusses why sociology has ignored gardens; and describes the methodology used in the study; and provides an overview of the subsequent chapters.

The third chapter examines global urbanism as postcolonial. It concentrates on colonialism’s role in physically, ecologically and culturally re-structuring cities around the world, emphasizing the colonial shaping of urban landscapes –parks and botanical gardens - in Zanzibar and Port of Spain. The chapter shows the divergent, contested and reshaped character of the urban ecologies of these two settings in post-colonial times. British colonialism’s urban parks and gardens in both settings are the focus. Robert Orchard Williams, who served as curator of the botanic gardens of both colonies, serves as a foil for reflecting on the colonial legacy’s different refractions in these two post-colonial settings. The chapter also shows the agency of ordinary people in changing the environmental-spatial structure over time.

This chapter discusses how cities can be made more livable through public gardens. It differentiates livability from sustainability in that sustainability adopts a long view of actions and policies and the ways in which development, according to a report by the World Commission on Environment and Development, “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” while livability focuses on current conditions and interventions, incorporating the environmental, economic, and equity priorities on a narrower spatial scale relevant to individual people, neighborhoods, and communities in geographically smaller areas. Efforts to enhance livability are primarily community based and driven by issues of local concern that reflect changing conditions. The chapter discusses the public garden movement in the United States and how it began with the early recognition of botanical gardens as keys to economic development. The involvement of botanical gardens in the livability of cities came largely in response to the challenges associated with nineteenth-century urbanization. Our concept of livability has now expanded to include concerns for sustainable development, smart growth and urban design, and community-identified priorities such as access to fresh and affordable food and urban green space as part of the public realm. Finally, the chapter also discusses cross-sector partnerships with public gardens and how this leads to collective action and collective impact.

This chapter discusses how developing public gardens has helped in improving the quality of science education. It features programs that are based at large, well-established gardens with strong board and community support. One such program is Project Green Reach (PGR) by the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. PGR is the project's response to the disparity between the science instruction at schools in wealthy neighborhoods, where parent organizations fund extracurricular learning and field trips, and the science programs offered by schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods that do not enjoy such support. Another program is the Fairchild Challenge by the Fairchild Botanical Garden in Miami, Florida, where students enter themed challenges throughout the school year. The chapter talks about Chicago Botanical Garden's Science Career Continuum which is focused on helping students get into science careers. The goals that motivated the creation of these programs are like those of many other public horticultural institutions — connecting people to plants, promoting the value and study of plants, and improving plant science education. The children involved in the programs are excited about science because of the way it is presented — they are encouraged to observe, to ask questions about what they see, to think of ways to test out possible answers to their questions, and to present their conclusions to their peers.

Chapter Five examines the workings of future storytelling, focusing on the mulberry bubble of the late 1830s. During this period, mulberry trees became a focus of financial speculation, not only through the networks of improvement, but also throughout U.S. financial centers. Speculators aspired to create a future empire of silk production, before prices plummeted. This chapter challenges the suggestion that such moments are deviations from normal, rational capitalism. Rather “manias” offer a chance to examine structures of credibility creation. The chapter sets the multicaulis mania in the global context of repeated silk fevers, then follows the particular variety Morus Multicaulis through global botanical networks into the networks of improving print culture. It connects the rise of the tree to the Panic of 1837 and shows how features of the variety itself, its leaf size and its easily calculable reproduction sustained forms of speculation, justified by new calculations about the nature of national consumption. Eventually, rising tree prices became their own justification, a rise punctured by a larger banking collapse. The chapter questions the retrospective justifications that sort successful attempts to create futures from those that fail, judging the first as rational and the second as fevered.

The polymath botanist Pál Kitaibel represents agricultural science, which has had strong traditions in Hungary. There are memorabilia of scientists in botany, zoology, veterinary medicine, economics of agriculture, and agricultural science, The principal venues of these activities are the veterinary school, the school of gardening and food industry (now part of Corvinus University), the ministry of agriculture, the Museum of Agriculture at Vajdahunyad Castle, the Budapest Zoo, and the Botanical Garden. Some of these venues are located amid beautiful parks. The statues in the park near Vajdahunyad Castle include those of Winston Churchill and George Washington.

The fragmentation of space was done in fine detail. The contradictions of an expansive capitalist state were foregrounded in this spatialization. Large-scale public buildings, symbolic of the cultural ethos of the Empire, vied with the scenic gardens and other symbols of ‘domesticity’ in the form of English cottages with their typical English names. An entirely new pattern for disposing of space appeared with an emphasis on the segregation and maintenance of power. The colonial urban experience further incorporated the discourse of the metropolis in which the urban hill stations played an important role in sustaining the imperial power in the colony. Churches, viceregal estates, and other monumental structures occupied prominent places. Malls and bazaars encircled the limited area of the station and the roads were for pedestrians. In the hills, the British could conform to English notions of taste and beauty and the only concession made was to the use of Indian woodcrafts or the local hill resources in the construction of imperial buildings.

It was not inevitable that Linnaeus' taxonomic system for classifying plants would still be used today. His success in persuading all of science that his nomenclature was superior to rival candidates is due to his travels through several truth-spots--places that lent credibility to his claims about plants and their ordering. Linnaeus first traveled to wild Lapland in his native Sweden, enduring risks and privations in order to collect botanical specimens previously unknown to science. He moved to Leiden, whose gardens at the time housed one of the largest collections of plants in Europe. Leiden was a research center, with an authoritative and demanding network of botanical experts who would need to be convinced if Linnaeus' proposed taxonomy were to become the universal standard. He eventually won them over in part by making the time spent at his field-site in Lapland into a heroic sacrifice for the good of science. Triumphantly, Linnaeus then returned to Uppsala, where he built his own botanical garden as a pedagogical demonstration site representing his system of classification. From this pulpit, he sent his apostles to the ends of the earth, where they collected more plants, each faithfully named according to Linnaean principles.

This chapter introduces various forms of popular pastimes and frenzies for species of plants and animals that characterized eighteenth century Japan. It includes landscaping, ornamental gardening, interbreeding of flowering plants, pet collections, and the growth of teahouses of natural curiosities. These crazes favored the further professionalization of honzōgaku scholars—in state institutions, in private schools, and as authors of manuals—and the growth of professions connected to plants and animals.