# The Dominion of Flowers: Botanical Art and Global Plant Relations - Hardcover

by **Mark Laird** (Author)

**How a wave of exotic botanical imports from across Britain's empire shaped its gardens and psyche**

Between 1760 and 1840, exotic plants were imported from across Britain's empire and were lavishly depicted in periodicals and scientific treatises as specimens collected alongside other objects of natural history. Mark Laird's provocative new book--part art history, part polemic--weaves fine art, botanical illustration, and previously unpublished archival material into a political and ethical account of Britain's heritage, showing how plants were not only integral to English gardens of the Georgian and Victorian eras but also to British culture more broadly.

_The Dominion of Flowers_ shines with captivating cross-cultural plant stories. The book opens with the Seymers' exotic _Butterflies and Plants_ and Pulteney's catalogue of Dorset's native wildflowers. It then moves to the German artist John Miller and his illustrations for Lord Bute's _Botanical Tables_ and concludes by tracing Britain's fascination with New Zealand's unique flora, first depicted in Mary Delany's collages.

Copiously illustrated with almost two hundred works, and drawing on Laird's genealogical research into his own family's colonial past, this volume foregrounds Indigenous ideas about "plant relations" in a study that brings the trans-oceanic movement of plants and people alive.

### Author Biography

**Mark Laird** is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and former faculty member at Harvard University. He is the author of _The Flowering of the Landscape Garden_ and _A Natural History of English Gardening_\--recipient of an Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award. He has been historic planting consultant to Painshill Park Trust, English Heritage, and Strawberry Hill Trust.

**Number of Pages:** 277

**Dimensions:** 1.1 x 10 x 8.6 IN

**Publication Date:** October 29, 2024

## Details

- **Price:** 50.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 50.00 USD | In stock |

## Images

- The Dominion of Flowers: Botanical Art and Global Plant Relations - Hardcover

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