Plants, Mobilities and Landscapes: Environmental Histories of Botanical Exchange

Abstract

This article explores environmental histories of botanical transfers, drawing on the emerging literature of mobilities in social science and historical research about patterns of plant movement. It sees such movement as integral to the annexation of nature by culture that characterises modernity. Using the metaphor of the web, the multi-directional complexity of these flows is assessed, to counter the seductive thesis of European 'ecological imperialism'. In addition to the widely acknowledged role of institutions, such as botanic gardens, in assembling and disseminating plant materials in calculative ways, attention is also drawn to commercial linkages. Elements of the refashioned landscapes that resulted are identified: these reveal the tensions of order, mobility and hybridity that also characterise modernity.

An Early Bioinvasion in the Azores. Global Circulation and Local Dynamics (1840s–1860s) in Response to the Brown Soft-Scale Coccus hesperidum

“…Actually, the same insect species invaded the orchards and gardens elsewhere at that time, and the agronomic knowledge and the methods of treatment referred to in the Azorean historical sources were used in several parts of the world. The "fashionable landscapes" of the orange groves, cared for or injured during the mid-nineteenth century in the archipelago, show "the tensions of order, mobility and hybridity" that characterize modernity in different geographies (Pawson 2008).…”

Planetary mobilities: movement, memory and emergence in the body of the Earth

“…The emergence of self-propelled animal motion constituted a shift of emphasis within solid mobility in the Earth from carrier-carried gratuity to power-direction gratuity; however, there are still countless examples of animals having organic 'passengers', from plant seeds and bacteria to internal symbionts and parasites, even before humans start domesticating horses and camels. But with the establishment of what we might call the 'kingdom of machines' the relation between carrier and carried is taken to new levels of arbitrariness, epitomised morphologically in sealed, standardised containers such as the Wardian case in the nineteenth century (Pawson, 2008) and the intermodal freight container in the twentieth (Birtchnell et al, 2015;Levinson, 2006). This form of gratuity is as crucial as powerdirection gratuity for today's global flows of freight, as it allows the meshing of long-distance advection between continents (by marine shipping and air), advection between cities (by truck and train) and local diffusive flow (by van).…”

Imperial Landscapes of Health: Place, Plants and People between India and Australia, 1800s–1900s

“…4 Instead of ideas or plants travelling along one-way paths, as was once thought, many historians are now adopting a more decentred and multinodal conceptualisation of Empire, one emphasising transfers between different places that changed over time. 5 Jodi Frawley, for example, writes of the way in which the meaning of plants shifted from place to place, in terms of both their cultural and scientifi c descriptions, and their physical attributes. 6 Both she and Lotte Hughes, among others, stress the complexity of nineteenth-century plant transfers.…”