By Mark Laird. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2024.

Between 1760 and 1840, exotic plants were imported from across Britain’s empire and were lavishly depicted in periodicals and scientific treatises. Mark Laird’s provocative new book – part art history, part polemic – weaves fine art, botanical illustration, gender studies and previously unpublished archival material into a political and ethical account of Britain’s heritage, showing how plants were not only integral to English gardens of the Georgian and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 Richard 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 and drawing on Laird’s genealogical research into his own family’s colonial past, The Dominion of Flowers foregrounds Indigenous ideas about ‘plant relations’ in a study that brings the trans-oceanic movement of plants and people alive.

Mark Laird is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, having previously taught landscape history for fifteen years at Harvard University. He is 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.