Plants, Empire, and Botanical Gatekeeping in Nineteenth-Century British Art

Throughout the nineteenth century, the geographical diversity of British horticulture grew in tandem with the borders of the British empire. Thousands of new flowers entered Britain from abroad during this period, many of which arrived from South Africa, India, the Caribbean, and other regions of colonial activity. Exotic plants were, in turn, embraced by Victorian painters, though a handful of critics maintained that native British flora ought to be prioritized in pictures over recent botanical imports. As plants from colonized territories became common motifs in Victorian painting, art writers waged debates about whether or not exotic garden flowers merited a place in British visual culture.

This paper analyzes how prejudices against plants from the extra-European world jointly informed discussions of art and gardening in Victorian Britain. From the 1850s onward, art critics became increasingly vocal about the appearance of foreign flowers in British painting. Some writers, such as John Ruskin, insisted that artists should confine their interests to common wayside flora, while others published elaborate tirades against exotic flowers in history paintings and genre scenes. Though they differed in tone, these two camps of criticism shared a deep nostalgia for idealized visions of a pre-colonial past, be it for the gardens of medieval Europe or the forests of primeval Britain. As I will argue, this xenophobic art criticism finds a corollary in how the Victorian horticultural press advanced its own imperialist claims about the ostensible superiority of British plant life.