Chapter 6 - Portraits of Plants

Summary

The plant as spectacle and specimen loomed large at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which celebrated human innovation in horticulture and botany. In the decades that followed, writers responded to the images of plant life and floral motifs that saturated visual culture, from botanical illustrations and flower painting to the new decorative schema developed by the Bloomsbury circle. This chapter traces the ways in which plants were revealed in new and sometimes unsettling forms in the literature, science and art of the fin de siècle and first decades of the twentieth century. While some writers looked at plants as if they were artworks, discoveries about plant sentience challenged existing taxonomies and critiques of materialism encouraged alternative understandings of vegetal life to emerge. The plant literature explored here – ranging across poetry, fiction, and art writing– turns out to offer a mirror for its authors’ aesthetic, ethical, and botanical concerns.