Tobacco for the flower garden: Plant collecting and plantation crops in nineteenth-century Britain

Abstract

This essay analyzes the understudied practice of collecting, marketing, and displaying colonial plant commodities as garden ornaments in nineteenth-century Britain. From the early modern period onward, British garden writers discussed tobacco, sugarcane, coffee, tea, and other colonial crops in their books and magazines, often citing colonial agriculture as a point of interest to curious gardeners. As I will argue, this mode of collecting and aestheticizing plants discloses the deep ambivalence of the British horticultural press toward the realities of plantation agriculture. Building on previous analyses of plants and empire, I show how the cultivation of tobacco in nineteenth-century flower gardens contributed to a broader mediation of Britain's colonial past in horticultural literature. Paying attention to this collecting trend will not only recover an overlooked chapter in the history of British horticulture, but also show how nineteenth-century garden writing operated as a space for transmitting (and manipulating) narratives about colonial agriculture.