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Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, died in 1715 having spent her life changing the floral world. She procured plants from Africa, India, China, Japan and South America that had never been seen in Britain before. These were for her vast formal garden – a print featured in this delightful exhibition shows its regular avenues and plantations, all covering a considerable part of Gloucestershire. But if Somerset’s disciplined parkland is pure Age of Reason, a painting she commissioned of one of her sunflowers is a yellow ecstasy: a blazing cosmic eye staring wildly at you.
Science and obsession, this show reveals, have never been far apart in the history of humans and plants. In the 1600s and 1700s, European botany made huge intellectual advances, filling European gardens with new colours and aromas. All this depended on growing commercial, naval and military might that brought the world’s seeds and bulbs to Britain and its neighbours. Yet even as pioneers collected and classified global flora, the sheer beauty and sensuality of flowers threatened to turn analysis into beauty-addled reverie.
This is hinted at in a portrait of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus dressed in traditional Sámi costume, sporting a shaman’s drum. Linnaeus invented the orderly classification of flora and fauna yet here allies himself with beliefs that humans can commune magically with nature. The portrait commemorates his expedition to the far north and, as for his book Flora Lapponica, was his attire a nod to the Sámi help he was given in identifying so many subarctic flowers?
Another adventurer here is responsible for the omnipresence of rhododendrons in the British Isles: Joseph Hooker. An illustration by Hooker himself commemorates his ripping yarns journey to the Himalayas in 1848-49 in search of this mountain flower and the seeds he brought back to Kew Gardens in London. By then, botany was inherently associated with far-off places. Kew was a multicultural paradise: an etching shows visitors admiring, among the planted trees, a mosque with a dome and two minarets, a replica of part of the Alhambra and a Chinese pagoda. Today, only the Great Pagoda remains. Victorians later came face-to-face with heady tropical plants in the Palm House, also illustrated here.
There’s a chance to sniff burnt poppy seeds next to a case containing a 19th-century opium pipe. The exhibition’s subtitle – How Plants Changed our World – really makes sense here. The gentle poppy wrecks lives, but beauty too is a drug. Nearby is a painting by the 17th-century Dutch still life artist Rachel Ruysch of poppies growing around a woodland tree: not the common or garden poppy but a flaming, dancing variant with long bloody petals that ravishingly explode in the shady forest where Ruysch has found them.
Except she didn’t. The forest setting is fictional, for the variation of poppy she paints didn’t evolve naturally but was bred by Dutch flower-fanciers as a novelty. Here is where the story of botany takes flight from science to sensuality, from interest to addiction. As well as cultivating new species of poppy, the Dutch at the height of their commercial power in the 1600s became obsessed with tulips, which came from the Islamic world and were particularly cultivated at the Ottoman court.
You can still feel the force of tulipomania in the disturbing beauty of Dutch flower paintings. Surrounded by night, the spiky curvaceous white and red tulips in Ambrosius Bosschaert’s c 1609 picture A Vase of Flowers are alluring fleurs du mal, perfect, irreplaceable, already dying as he paints them. Dutch tulip paintings are cleverly shown here beside Turkish ceramic platters with tulip decorations that see the flower with a calmer sensuality, as part of an eternal pattern preserved forever on the plate. European flower paintings are more scientific, more precise, yet more brooding and romantic. Life implies death. The caterpillar and snail are coming.
Beneath all the derring-do there is no avoiding the melancholy. We see botanical drawings and pressed flowers – some petals in albums here are 400 years old. Yet more eye-catchingly bizarre, in fact even grotesque, are 19th-century “teaching models” of flowers made of painted wood and papier-mache that meticulously simulate every detail of orchids and other flora, lifesize, for students to learn, well, what? These supposedly scientific models look as freakish as old anatomical waxworks of eviscerated human bodies. There are some lovely works of art here but I couldn’t escape the thought that all of art and science are helpless before the mystery and beauty of a single living daisy.
