1
Horticulture and botany
Lynn Voskuil
University of Houston, United States
The story of horticulture and botany in
Victorian Britain is a narrative of mingled
development. Throughout much of the
century, the practices of the two fields were
closely intertwined rather than demarcated
into the zones of “garden” and “laboratory,” as
they usually are today. The development of
botany as a field of scientific inquiry was sig-
nally shaped by botanists like Joseph Hooker
and Charles Darwin, colleagues and good
friends who shared a passion for plants and a
conviction that their study should be codified
and elevated. University professors like John
Lindley also sought to distinguish botany
from the more practical field of horticulture.
Intellectual culture in Victorian Britain, how-
ever, was less fragmented than it is today, with
fewer disciplinary distinctions and separa-
tions. The cultural meanings of “profession”
were still in flux, and the various emergent
fields of science (as we understand that term
now) still owed much of their authority to the
social status of the gentlemen who continued
to be some of their most esteemed practi-
tioners (Endersby 2008). Throughout much
of the century, moreover, scientific study was
pursued in popular and commercial venues
as well as university settings (Lightman 2007).
It is thus often difficult to distinguish pre-
cisely between the nineteenth‐century prac-
tices of botany and horticulture using our own
conceptions of those fields. Darwin himself
repurposed many homely items to test his the-
ories and often included his children in the
botanical experiments he undertook at Down
House, his home in Kent. For their part, hor-
ticulturists and garden designers like J. C.
The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, First Edition. Edited by Dino Franco Felluga.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118405376.wbevl147
Loudon, Joseph Paxton, William Robinson,
and Gertrude Jekyll learned much from their
botanical colleagues. Together, both horticul-
turists and botanists created and consulted a
horticultural and botanical press that grew
exponentially in Victorian Britain. The rich
mix of science, aesthetics, empire, and domes-
ticity that characterized this complex process of
shared development was reflected, discussed,
and debated in an array of texts throughout the
nineteenth century. This entry refers to those
texts as the Victorians often did – without
dividing them strictly into “literary,” “aesthetic,”
and “scientific” texts – in order to place botany
and horticulture within a broadly cultural
framework.
Plant technologies
The shared development of botany and horti-
culture in Victorian Britain was propelled by
the new availability of nonnative, or exotic,
species that were flowing into the capital from
colonial outposts and other global sites. New
technologies for the study and cultivation of
plants emerged to keep pace. Exotic plants, to
be sure, had been available in Britain well
before the Victorian era. By 1787, The Botanical
Magazine; or Flower‐Garden Displayed (later
Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, published by the
Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew), had begun
to educate a wide readership with descriptions
and lavish illustrations of exotic plants already
cultivated in Britain. In 1804, the Horticultural
Society of London (eventually to become the
Royal Horticultural Society) was founded
and began funding plant‐hunting trips in
order to secure new exotic species. The market
for such plants expanded after 1830, however,
when inventor Nathaniel Ward perfected
a  new technology: the “Wardian case,” a
2 
t­ errarium‐like container with glass walls that
enabled the shipping of live plants from dis-
tant parts of the globe. Previously, exotic
species could only be cultivated in Britain
from seeds or cuttings brought from overseas,
which often did not prove viable; now, live
exotic plants – even tropical species – could
be transported in growing medium and
transplanted into greenhouses, conserva-
tories, indoor terrariums, or directly into the
garden where climate permitted.
The numbers of imported plants accord-
ingly increased. In the seventeenth century,
Loudon estimated, about 130 botanical
species had been introduced into England; in
the eighteenth century, approximately 440;
and in the first thirty years of the nineteenth
century alone, about 700 species were intro-
duced (Colquhoun 2006, 21) – a number that
continued to grow rapidly in later decades.
Nurserymen like Conrad Loddiges, James
Veitch, and Benjamin Williams specialized in
exotic species and often funded their own
plant‐hunters, introducing plants that figure
prominently in British gardens to this day.
Initially, affluent Britons with large gardens
were the primary purchasers of these
­specimens. But by 1850, even modest homes
in Britain could boast a window box that
included a pelargonium (now known as the
common geranium), a genus with many
species native to South Africa. Novelist
Elizabeth Gaskell reflected this widespread
cultural familiarity with exotic plants when
she portrayed a leafy geranium on the Bartons’
Manchester window sill at the beginning of
her working‐class novel Mary Barton (1848).
The rapid expansion of available species
fed a public hungry for novel plants and
provided work for people in the overlapping
fields of plant study. Lindley spent a good
deal of his time identifying and classifying
newly discovered species in his capacity as
Professor of Botany at University College
London and a fellow of many scientific
societies, but he also collaborated with gar-
den designers like Paxton on the cultivation
of plants for the greenhouse and landscape.
While Hooker identified himself primarily as
a scientist, like Lindley he also understood
the importance of a popular audience, both
before and after he became Director of the
Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew; in 1849, for
instance, he published The Rhododendrons of
Sikkim‐Himalaya, a gorgeously illustrated
volume introducing new species of rhodo-
dendrons suitable for British gardens.
Gardeners like Paxton used such volumes to
design the grounds of their wealthy patrons.
While the position of head gardener or
landscape designer had begun to emerge in
the eighteenth century, it acquired new
professional prestige and cultural significance
in the Victorian era.
The increasing professionalization of both
botany and horticulture as fields of practice
was offset by the widespread popularity of
science among lay people. “Victorian
Popularizers of science,” as Bernard Lightman
has called them, were instrumental in the dif-
fusion of scientific knowledge – including
knowledge about plants – to a wider audience
than ever before. Lightman attributes this
intensifying popularization to a number of
complexly intertwined forces, among them
rising literacy rates, a technological revolu-
tion in printing and book publishing, and the
bestseller status of volumes like Robert
Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of
Creation (1844). While scientists like T. H.
Huxley authored some of these popular
books, others were written by lay people who
were interested in the sciences (Lightman
2007, 1–38). These forces were also factors in
the development of botany and horticulture.
As fields of inquiry, their practices were not
invariably perceived as either “scientific” or
“aesthetic,” “expert,” or “popular.”
In particular, Victorian publications about
plants clearly highlight the intertwined

development of botany and horticulture.
Spurred by new, cheaper printing technol-
ogies, increasing numbers of specialist jour-
nals and popular magazines provided vehicles
for disseminating botanic and horticultural
findings. In 1826, Loudon launched the
Gardener’s Magazine, the first periodical that
targeted amateur gardeners; an astounding
4,000 copies of the first number were sold in
the first few days following publication
(Colquhoun 2006, 22). A few years later,
Lindley and Paxton founded the Gardener’s
Chronicle, to which both Hooker and Darwin
eventually contributed, with The Cottage
Gardener (later to become the Journal of
Horticulture) not far behind. By the 1870s,
when William Robinson started The Garden,
he was competing in a literary marketplace
saturated with information about plants. At
the same time, botanical volumes and
scientific journals also reached the wider
public. Darwin’s three most important
botanic works, for example – On the Various
Contrivances by which British and Foreign
Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects (1862), On
the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants
(1865), and Insectivorous Plants (1875) – were
widely popular and cited in horticultural
periodicals as well as scientific journals (see
Smith 2006, 160–65). While Darwin per-
ceived his orchid volume as an evidentiary
foundation for On the Origin of Species, pub-
lished a few years earlier in 1859, it also
became a favored manual among orchid
enthusiasts.
Although Victorian botanists and horticul-
turists learned from each other and fre-
quently collaborated, tensions were also
generated by new ways of studying plants,
and the first signs of separation began to
emerge between the two fields. Practical gar-
deners, many of whom contributed to the
horticultural journals, sometimes scoffed at
the “theory” of botany, arguing that horticul-
ture was grounded in experience rather than
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science. “I do believe if botany could be
divested of its humbug, many would be glad
to study it,” wrote one contributor to The
Garden and Practical Florist (quoted in
Carter 1984, 105). Such conflicts are central
to Wives and Daughters (1864–66), another
novel by Gaskell, who was friends with
Darwin and fascinated by the cultures of
natural history. The novel follows the
development of Molly Gibson through her
teen years into her early twenties, as she
slowly falls in love with Roger Hamley, a
professional naturalist modeled on Darwin.
His pursuits alienate him from his father,
Squire Hamley, a skilled horticultural and
agricultural manager of the ancient family
seat. By the end of the novel, it is clear that
Roger will finally have accumulated a
sufficient living from his naturalist ventures
to support Molly and a family. But the tension
between father and son, between practical
horticulturist and expert naturalist, is never
fully resolved and provides many of the
obstacles for Gaskell’s marriage plot.
In no cultural space were the possibilities
of new plant technologies seen more clearly
than in the glasshouse. Wardian cases were
but one member of a family of Victorian glass
structures that included large conservatories
maintained by the landed gentry, more
manageably sized greenhouses, hothouses,
­
and even cold frames and glass cloches. The
primary function of these structures was
to  extend the growing season and enable
the  cultivation of tender plants in harsh
­climates.  As heating technologies improved,
the botanic possibilities were increasingly
enhanced. The perfectly ripened cherries and
pomegranates in Christina Rossetti’s poem
“Goblin Market,” for example, have the aura
of unblemished, hothouse fruit grown in a
greenhouse. Glass architecture also enabled
the large‐scale cultivation of tropical orchid
species, as well as their hybridization, a
­process that was developed in the 1860s.
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Victorians loved the provocative structures
and colors of tropical orchids and grew them
in “orchid houses.” Reflecting this Victorian
obsession, sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth
Braddon repeatedly used orchids as emblems
of irresistible passion. In her novel Vixen
(1879), for example, Lady Mabel, the genteel
cultivator of a prize Dendrobium formosum,
eventually finds herself in a predictably illicit
tête‐à‐tête with Lord Mallow “in one of
the  orchid‐houses, breathing a perfumed
atmosphere at eighty degrees, vaporous,
balmy, slumberous” (Braddon 1879, 163).
The greatest glasshouse was the Crystal
Palace in London, Paxton’s architectural tour
de force that dominated the Great Exhibition
of 1851, which sheltered a number of large,
exotic specimens and staged England’s
industrial prowess for all the world to see.
Paxton’s design was inspired by the giant
Amazonian water‐lily Victoria regia, which
had been named for the newly crowned
queen in the late 1830s and was finally
brought to flower in England by Paxton him-
self in the late 1840s at Chatsworth, the estate
of his patron the Duke of Devonshire. In the
Crystal Palace, Victorian plant technologies
had their most spectacular embodiment.
Plant cultures
If new Victorian plant technologies enabled
the introduction of countless new specimens,
the cultivation of plants had been a long‐
standing preoccupation in Britain well before
the Victorian era. Predating the emergence of
botany as a science by several centuries,
physic gardens – like the Chelsea Physic
Garden in London, founded in 1673 – grew
medicinal plants that were used to treat ill-
ness. The development of botany, moreover,
was bolstered in the eighteenth century with
impetus from the taxonomic research of
Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. As a popular
pastime, botany was often grouped with
zoology and geology as a subset of “natural
history.” Already in the eighteenth century,
many ordinary people participated in the
practices of natural history by collecting
natural specimens – shells, rocks, insects,
animal parts and skeletons, for example, as
well as plants.
Such pastimes intensified in the nineteenth
century, spurred by the Victorian impulse to
collect, and prompted the development of an
important plant culture: the preservation of
specimens. As Lightman has shown, the gen-
eral appetite for science intensified in the
Victorian era among both middle‐class and
working‐class readers, which ensured that
the study of plants would continue to remain
broadly popular beyond university labora-
tories and herbariums. The practice of natural
history involved identifying and describing
specimens as well as collecting them, activ-
ities that even people of modest means could
undertake with minimal equipment (Larsen
1996), as the figure of Gaskell’s Job Legh, in
Mary Barton, attests. Some collectors earned
a living by supplying specimens for scientists
like Hooker; many of these people were sea-
soned, professional travelers who foraged the
globe for viable objects. Others collected for
pleasure. Where plants were concerned, a
usable specimen required careful preserva-
tion through drying and pressing, submersion
in appropriate chemicals, or illustration –
and, in many cases, a combination of
these techniques. Larger specimens were
more difficult to preserve and transport, as
illustrated by the heroics required to obtain,
preserve, and ship a sample of the enormous
Victoria regia from the Amazon to England
(Holway 2013).
A crucial artifact for the practice of botany
was the “herbarium sheet,” a dried, flattened,
labeled plant specimen with all its botanical
parts; these preserved specimens were the
crux of any botanical collection, amateur or

scientific. The plants Darwin collected on the
Beagle voyage, for example, were carefully
shipped to John Henslow, his mentor at
Cambridge, who supervised the construction
of herbarium sheets. Although collecting and
preserving plants were essential to the prac-
tice of botany, Hooker and his colleagues
were eager to leave those activities to ama-
teurs and undertake more sweeping scientific
analysis – the study of how plants were dis-
tributed globally, for instance (Endersby
2008). Ultimately, the devaluation of collect-
ing and related practices contributed to the
relegation of natural history to a popular
realm and the isolation of botany as science
in laboratory and university settings (Nyhart
1996).
As Ann Shteir (1996) has shown, many
early botanists were women; in her view,
the process of institutionalizing botany after
1830 was also a process of masculinizing it.
A leading figure in this process was Lindley,
whose Ladies’ Botany (1834–37) – one of
many botanical volumes he published –
aimed to demarcate an acceptable study of
plants for women so that the scientific study
of plants could be reserved for men. To some
degree, Lindley’s aim to gender the study of
plants was fulfilled by the end of the century,
with women’s interests in plants often repre-
sented as residing in the moral, spiritual, and
domestic realms rather than the scientific.
Nonetheless, women remained prominent in
plant cultures throughout the Victorian era
and beyond (see Gates 1998). Jane Loudon,
the wife of J. C. Loudon, for example, was
an important horticulturist in her own right
and the author of many volumes of both
botany and horticulture. While some targeted
women readers – among them Practical
Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1840)
and The Lady’s Country Companion, or How
to Enjoy a Country Life Rationally (1845) –
she also published British Wild Flowers (1844)
and Modern Botany (1851), volumes that
  5
analyzed plants systematically rather than
practically or aesthetically. The 1851 title
updated and renamed her earlier book Botany
for Ladies (1842), a marketing decision that
challenged Lindley’s gendered divisions
(Shteir 1996, 221–27).
At the end of the century, horticulturist
Gertrude Jekyll became influential in garden
design, achieving an authority her figure
retains to this day. Over the course of her
career, she designed hundreds of gardens,
many of them on country estates, and
authored hundreds of articles and a number
of widely read books on gardening and rural
tradition, including Wood and Garden (1899),
Home and Garden (1900), Old West Surrey
(1904), and Colour in the Flower Garden
(1908). Women’s roles in plant cultures were
widely represented in many textual genres.
Amy King has demonstrated, for example,
the use of a “vernacularized botanical lan-
guage” (2002, 4) derived from Linnaeus in
a  number of nineteenth‐century novels,
including George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859)
and Middlemarch (1871–72). Women were
also associated with the genteel cultivation of
plants in more general cultural terms, most
notably with floriculture. Popular throughout
the Victorian era were sentimental flower
books that glossed a “language of flowers,”
often in poetic form, and targeted women
readers in particular.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the
garden was idealized as a special cultural
space and frequently perceived as integral to
domestic culture, a representation that con-
tributed to the association of women with
certain forms of horticulture. In concrete
terms, the garden was often materially
essential; from kitchen gardens on large
estates to the “allotment gardens” cultivated
by working‐class people, the growth of food
crops in British gardens sustained many
households. At the same time, gardening was
thought to confer unique virtues, and the
6 
garden was conceived as an almost hallowed
space. For Loudon, a champion of real,
working‐class cottage gardens, the practice of
horticulture promoted industrious habits on
a large scale. He argued that the working
classes should be given good arable land to
cultivate for their own use. In contrast to
Loudon, horticultural writer Shirley Hibberd
portrayed gardens in acutely idealized moral
and spiritual terms, conceiving of them as
divine. Such associations were also widely
reflected in Victorian fiction as well as in
botanic and horticultural writing. In
Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Tancred (1847), for
example, the protagonist Benjamin de
Montacute finds his Adamic roots – and his
future wife Eva – in an Eastern garden in
what Victorians called “the Holy Land.”
Cottage gardens, their working‐class pedi-
gree notwithstanding, were among the most
idealized horticultural sites. Gertrude Jekyll
represented them as the most authentically
English garden type (Helmreich 2002). This
vision was captured earlier in the century at
the close of Gaskell’s Mary Barton when an
English cottage garden is planted in the
Canadian wilderness, marking the conclusion
of the marriage plot and the restoration of
social order.
Even the most hallowed Victorian gardens
relied on the new plant technologies,
including the importation of exotic species
that was maintained apace throughout the
era. Later in the century, however, both horti-
culturists and botanists were awakened to the
ecological toll sometimes exacted by such
practices. In their horticultural writings,
Robinson and Jekyll both began to advocate
for the (re)cultivation of native English
species, though neither completely pro-
scribed the use of exotics (see Helmreich
2002). Their aesthetic arguments were paral-
leled by the emergent science of ecology, the
study of how organisms interact with each
other and their environment. Although the
term “oecologie” was coined by German zool-
ogist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, he was influ-
enced heavily by Darwin (Egerton 2012,
198–200). At the turn of the century, the
British botanist A. G. Tansley began to
explore related ideas at the University of
London, eventually ­contributing the concept
of the “ecosystem” to ecological theory. These
ideas were captured most memorably, per-
haps, in the specter of the rampant, exotic
“Red Weed” that blights the English country-
side in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds
(1898). A trained biologist, Wells recognized
the problematic ecological potential of some
Victorian plant cultures and reimagined them
for a new age.
SEE ALSO: Darwin, Charles; Gaskell,
Elizabeth; Science
References
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 1879. Vixen. Vol. 3.
London: John and Robert Maxwell. Accessed
November 25, 2014. http://archive.org/stream/
vixennovel03brad#page/n3/mode/2up.
Carter, Tom. 1984. The Victorian Garden. London:
Bell & Hyman.
Colquhoun, Kate. 2006. “The Busiest Man in
England”: A Life of Joseph Paxton, Gardener,
Architect and Victorian Visionary. Boston, MA:
David R. Godine.
Egerton, Frank N. 2012. Roots of Ecology: Antiquity
to Haeckel. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Endersby, Jim. 2008. Imperial Nature: Joseph
Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gates, Barbara T. 1998. Kindred Nature:
Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the
Living World. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Helmreich, Anne. 2002. The English Garden
and  National Identity: The Competing Styles
of  Garden Design, 1879–1914. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Holway, Tatiana. 2013. The Flower of Empire: An
Amazonian Water Lily, the Quest to Make It

Bloom, and the World It Created. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
King, Amy. 2002. Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular
in the English Novel. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Larsen, Anne. 1996. “Equipment for the Field.” In
Cultures of Natural History, edited by N. Jardine,
J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, 358–77. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lightman, Bernard. 2007. Victorian Popularizers of
Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nyhart, Lynn K. 1996. “Natural History and the
‘New’ Biology.” In Cultures of Natural History,
  7
edited by N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary,
426–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shteir, Ann B. 1996. Cultivating Women,
Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and
Botany in England, 1760–1860. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Smith, Jonathan. 2006. Charles Darwin and
Victorian Visual Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Further Reading
Elliott, Brent. 1986. Victorian Gardens. Portland,
OR: Timber Press.