Search

In the second half of the nineteenth century gardening flourished in Portugal's public sphere, having considerably expanded beyond the private realms of palaces and villas. Envisioned as a sophisticated branch of knowledge, horticulture became a hub for citizen science, commercial activities, public education, and civic events. This was a context that fostered and advanced women's involvement and status as gardeners, horticulturists, and educators, a development influenced by popular Portuguese perceptions of women as protectors. The Royal Society of Horticulture of Portugal (founded in Lisbon as "National" in 1898, decreed "Royal" in 1900), instantiated this enmeshment of perception with status by designating women members as 'Lady Guardians' while promoting their participation, especially as competitors and jurists in the society's flower exhibitions. The women of the society offer a window into the more general identities and professional statuses of women horticulturalists as 'guardians' in a generalized sense: they included landowners, writers, gardeners, and family business owners, with many assuming greater responsibility in widowhood. At a time when women's participation in science was highly constricted, horticulture as a field, and the Royal Society of Horticulture as its premier institution, constituted a remarkable opportunity for women to be publicly engaged and recognized for their expertise as amateur botanists alongside their male counterparts. This article's analysis demonstrates that women horticulturalists in Portugal were a quite heterogenous group, consisting of women from the highest ranks of the nobility, participating alongside women from further social ranks, inclusive of the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and urban middle classes. Their participation in the society not only afforded them opportunities locally and civically, but also internationally, as will be illustrated by a few careers that reflect how education, travels, and professional engagement demonstrated the broad reach of Portuguese women's horticultural activities., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

'Adam's laburnum' (or Cytisus adami), produced by accident in 1825 by Jean-Louis Adam, a nurseryman in Vitry, became a commercial success within the plant trade for its striking mix of yellow and purple flowers. After it came to the attention of members of La Société d'Horticulture de Paris, the tree gained enormous fame as a potential instance of the much sought-after 'graft hybrid', a hypothetical idea that by grafting one plant onto another, a mixture of the two could be produced. As I show in this paper, many eminent botanists and gardeners, including Charles Darwin, both experimented with Adam's laburnum and argued over how it might have been produced and what light, if any, it shed on the laws of heredity. Despite Jean-Louis Adam's position and status as a nurseryman active within the Parisian plant trade, a surprising degree of doubt and scepticism was attached to his testimony on how the tree had been produced in his nursery. This doubt, I argue, helps us to trace the complex negotiations of authority that constituted debates over plant heredity in the early 19th century and that were introduced with a new generation of gardening and horticultural periodicals.

In this paper, we address the emergence of horticultural practice, agents, spaces and institutions in the two urban settings of Lisbon and Porto, in Portugal, during the second half of the nineteenth century. We do so by following the networking activities of two players: the self-made horticulturist and entrepreneur José Marques Loureiro, who created, in Porto, a commercial horticultural establishment and founded the Journal of Practical Horticulture; and the agronomist Francisco Simões Margiochi, head of the gardens and green grounds department of the municipality, who created the first course on gardening and horticulture, and founded the Royal Horticultural Society, both in Lisbon. Their joint activities were aimed at establishing horticulture as an applied science and to cater simultaneously to an extended audience of citizens. They enable us to enrich the narratives on the emergence and development of horticulture in Europe by calling attention to the participation in circulatory extended networks of actors who are often absent from these accounts. Additionally, they allow a comparative assessment of the outcome of their actions at the national level, and to understand their results in terms consonant with recent historiographical trends on the co-construction of centres and peripheries., Abbreviations: AML - Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa (Municipal Archive of Lisbon).; ANTT - Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (National Archives at Torre do Tombo).; AHCPL - Arquivo Histórico da Casa Pia de Lisboa (Historical Archive of the Casa Pia of Lisbon).; JHP - Jornal de Horticultura Practica (Journal of Practical Horticulture). Online at: http://www.fc.up.pt/fa/?p=nav&f=html.fbib-Periodico-oa&item=378 ; BSNHP - Boletim da Sociedade Nacional de Horticultura de Portugal (Bulletin of the National Society of Horticulture of Portugal).

Rhubarb was grown and used throughout China for thousands of years. It then found its way to St Petersburg where the Romanovs developed a flourishing trade in the plant to the rest of Europe. James Mounsey, a physician to the Tsar, brought back seeds from Russia to Scotland at considerable risk to himself. He passed some of the seeds to Alexander Dick and John Hope. Both these physicians then grew rhubarb at Prestonfield and the Botanic Garden (both in Edinburgh), respectively. Eventually rhubarb, in the form of Gregory's powder, became a common and popular medicine throughout the UK.

Humans use a variety of deliberate means to modify biologically rich environs in pursuit of resource stability and predictability. Empirical evidence suggests that ancient hunter-gatherer populations engineered ecological niches to enhance the productivity and availability of economically significant resources. An archaeological excavation of a 3800-year-old wetland garden in British Columbia, Canada, provides the first direct evidence of an engineered feature designed to facilitate wild plant food production among mid-to-late Holocene era complex fisher-hunter-gatherers of the Northwest Coast. This finding provides an example of environmental, economic, and sociopolitical coevolutionary relationships that are triggered when humans manipulate niche environs.

The 17th-century arrival of the Hudson's Bay Company in Rupert's Land disrupted Mushkegowuk (Cree) hunter-gatherer society by replacing the collection of indigenous plant foods with a British planted-food model. Within a hundred years of British contact, new foodways relied upon hunting and gardening, bringing a loss in heritage plant food knowledge. Mushkegowuk living in the sub-arctic today have minimal knowledge of edible indigenous plants. Dependence on limited local gardening or imported grocery store vegetables has affected diet, nutrition, and cultural systems. In addition to exploring plant food gathering and gardening history in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, this paper demonstrates how re-discovering lost foodway knowledge can contribute to the health and well-being of those living in the far north.

Rémy Willemet is above all a local botanist whose first work was selected by the academy of Nancy in 1766. His notoriety began when another work with Jean-François Coste was chosen by the academy of Lyon ten years later. He published then in many papers and was elected in numerous academies and scientific societies. During the Revolution, he was a professor of the Ecole centrale de la Meurthe and of the Société de santé, and he became the chairman of the botanical garden. Willemet wrote some botanical books. Today, what is the memory of his researchs and papers? Fairly few things because he never undertook botanical travels in order to discover and compare pharmaceutical plants. However, Willemetia was the name used to denominate some species and honour his family. His name was also engraved on the wall of some university buidings and it was chosen some years ago to entitle a botanical paper in Lorraine.

The life and death of California's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP, 1983-2012) offers a unique analytical window into the time and space of the U.S. war on drugs in a global context. This paper draws on CAMP report archives, ethnographic interviews, and secondary data sources to locate the significance of CAMP, its demise, and enduring legacy for the political economy of domestic illicit cannabis production in southern Humboldt County, where it was initially focused. I first introduce the economic geography of cannabis production in southern Humboldt County and California. In the first part of the paper, using theoretical frameworks from Critical Geopolitics and International Relations, I examine the geo-politics of CAMP's emergence. In the second part of the paper, I examine industrial reterritorialization associated with its geographies of enforcement over time. I conclude by discussing the eclipse of its foundational logic-and-practice (policing the "Emerald Triangle") by new political and economic geographies of power., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Flowers were central to the life and work of Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), one of the 20th century's most influential garden designers. Born of parents with interests across a broad range of the art-science spectrum, Miss Jekyll developed an early interest in many arts and crafts, including painting and gardening in particular. During her course at the Central School of Design in Kensington she studied closely the work of JMW Turner. Many of the compositional elements of Turner's paintings, especially his use of colour, can be seen in Miss Jekyll's subsequent designs for c. 250 gardens. The use of blue and yellow flowers to create a sense of light, and the contrast of cool blue flowers and grey foliage with vivid reds and oranges are recurrent themes in her planting schemes, but many other aspects of her designs also reflect her broad interest in the art, craft, and science of plant cultivation. She encouraged others to seek the satisfaction offered by gardening as an art, convinced that a life spent seeking perfection would gradually yield 'the power of intelligent combination, the nearest thing we can know to the mighty force of creation'.

Premise of the Study: The poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) is the world's most economically important potted plant, but despite its preeminence it is not clear which wild populations are ancestral to the varieties cultivated around the world. Tradition holds that the U.S. envoy to Mexico J. R. Poinsett collected the progenitors of the over 300 varieties in global cultivation on an 1828 excursion to northern Guerrero State, Mexico. It is unknown whether the contemporary cultivars are descended from plants from Guerrero or whether germplasm from other parts of poinsettia's 2000 km long distribution entered into cultivation during the nearly 200 yr of subsequent poinsettia horticulture., Methods: To identify the wild populations that likely gave rise to the cultivars and test this historical account, we sequenced plastid and nuclear DNA regions and modeled poinsettia's potential distribution., Key Results: The combination of nuclear and plastid haplotypes characterizing cultivars was found only in northern Guerrero. Distribution modeling indicated that suitable habitat conditions for wild poinsettias are present in this area, consistent with their likely wild status., Conclusions: Our data pinpoint the area of northern Guerrero as the cultivated poinsettia's probable ancestral region, congruent with the traditional account attributing the original collections to Poinsett. Abundant genetic variation likely offers raw material for improving the many shortcomings of cultivars, including vulnerability to cold, stem breakage, and pathogens such as Pythium and Phytophthora. However, genetic differences between populations make conservation of all of poinsettia's diversity difficult.

Americans are in the midst of a food-consciousness revival: on television, in the mouth of the First Lady, in endless articles celebrating urban agriculture can be found a sudden enthusiasm for the politically and, perhaps, spiritually curated dinner table. In this special section, writers explore the perilous state of food and food politics in America and a wide range of responses on the Left. Marion Nestle, in her essay on the farm bill, describes how the existing policy disaster came to be, along with the relationship between Reagan-era deregulation and the obesity epidemic. Mark Engler describes both the successes and coopting of the strands of left-wing responses—buying organic, eating local, and agitating for fair trade—and asks, "What's a radical to eat?" Laurie Woolever uncovers the kind of labor exploitation endemic to the elite dining experience. Karen Bakker Le Billon compares American to French school lunches, unpacking the relationship between food and citizenship. Juliana DeVries explores vegetarianism and the politics of everyday life.

Through the case-study of the visit of a prominent New Zealand medical reformer and his wife to Japan in 1904, this article examines new aspects of the health and environmental connections between Japan and New Zealand in the early twentieth century. At one level, the article analyses the broader context of interest in Japanese plants in New Zealand and the model of Japanese health reforms constituted by these connections. At another, it argues that subjects previously considered separate--such as modem health reform, scientific agriculture and gardening, and Japanese and New Zealand intellectual influences--need to be considered together as contemporaries understood them. Doing so, it suggests, enables the more accurate consideration of the intellectual and scientific worlds of the early twentieth century and hints at the global dimensions of aspects of thought and state and societal reform associated with modernity.

In the history of city planning, the dichotomy between the aesthetic aspirations of the City Beautiful and City Practical movements is overstated. The aesthetic impulse did not disappear but persisted as an important thread through the development of comprehensive planning approaches into the 1920s. The nexus between beauty and utility was negotiated and expressed across four main discourses: broad social improvement, aesthetic functionality, economic rationality, and holistic design. Ultimately, beauty became wedded to utility within the very nature of the comprehensive city plan itself. The work of the leading city planner John Nolen is central to an understanding of these historic continuities and informed the early evolution of city planning theory and practice. Nolen’s challenge to the City Beautiful paradigm, while still retaining an artistic sensibility, reaestheticizes scholars’ appreciation of the City Practical.

Declining profitability of agriculture and/or higher prices of forest products and services typically drive an increase in forest cover. This article examines changes in forest cover in Candelaria Loxicha, Mexico. Forest cover increased in the area as a result of coffee cultivation in coffee forest-garden systems. Dependence on forest products and services, and not prices of forest products, drive the process in our study site. Low international coffee prices and high labor demand outside the community might pull farmers out of agriculture, but they do not completely abandon the lands. A diversification in income sources prevents land abandonment and contributes to maintaining rural populations and coffee forest gardens.

The need for action on the global environment is now well understood and governments, agencies, non-governmental organizations and botanic gardens have all been working in their various ways to promote environmental sustainability and reduce species and habitat loss for at least 10–20 years. The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) has been widely adopted, particularly by the botanic garden community, and has resulted in many successes despite failing to achieve its ultimate goal of halting the loss of plant biodiversity. The objectives and targets for Phase 2 of the GSPC, running from 2010 to 2020, mirror those of Phase 1 and had been largely agreed prior to their formal adoption at the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya in October 2010. However, to be successful, the scientific contribution of botanic gardens needs to be strengthened, as does government policy and commitment. Botanic garden research to underpin conservation action, including the role of botanic garden horticulture, training and international capacity building, has a major part to play and needs to be better understood and better coordinated. We provide examples based on the experience of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in the UK and overseas. Government policy, at national and international levels, needs to reflect the fundamental importance of plant diversity in maintaining the biosphere and supporting humanity. The commitment of significant new resources is an essential prerequisite for success, but this needs to be well coordinated, inclusive of all stakeholders and carefully targeted. A further challenge is the need to integrate better the plant diversity-related activities of what are currently diverse and disconnected sectors, including agriculture, forestry, protected area management and botanic gardens.

This article examines the way in which public response to a municipal proposal concerning greenspace reduction in Paris during the Second Empire reflected not only political antipathy but also an ever-increasing understanding of public urban greenspace as part of the private domain. By examining archival records concerning the proposal, essays, newspaper accounts, and memoirs, this article argues that a particular proprietary sensibility, fomented by expansive public greenspace development in Paris, intersected with extant social constructs and political tensions to create a public, coordinated, and sustained challenge to the authoritarian regime. Thus, the battle over the Luxembourg Garden became more than just a fight to prevent a reduction in size of a particular public urban greenspace. Rather, public debate surrounding alteration of this garden underscores the extent to which public greenspace, in general, was urban space that blurred the public—private boundary and presented unique opportunities for community formation, social integration, and political action.

A new international initiative for plant conservation was first called for as a resolution of the International Botanical Congress in 1999. The natural home for such an initiative was considered to be the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD agreed to consider a Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) at its 5th meeting in 2000. It was proposed that the GSPC could provide an innovative model approach for target setting within the CBD and, prior to COP5, a series of inter-sessional papers on proposed targets and their justification were developed by plant conservation experts. Key factors that ensured the adoption of the GSPC by the CBD in 2002 included: (1) ensuring that prior to and during COP5, key Parties in each region were supportive of the Strategy; (2) setting targets at the global level and not attempting to impose these nationally; and (3) the offer by Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) to support a GSPC position in the CBD Secretariat for 3 years, which provided a clear indication of the support for the GSPC from non-governmental organizations (NGO).

This article examines citizen participation in the governance of contemporary urban green space. Rather than exploring normative questions of ideal forms of participatory democracy, it focuses on changing roles and relationships between local state and non-state actors in order to identify and explain the changing nature of participation. I argue that neoliberal urban restructuring has changed the conditions for participation and thus participation itself in fundamental ways and that we need an account of changes in statehood and governance in order to capture this conceptually. Based on the case of community gardens in Berlin, the article discusses the extent to which this changed relationship is expressed by current citizen participation as well as the potential and problems that result from it. My empirical results show the emergence of a new political acceptance of autonomously organized projects and active citizen participation in urban green space governance. The central argument of this article is that this new acceptance can be conceptualized as an expression of the neoliberalization of cities. Nevertheless, this neoliberal strategy at the same time leads to complex and contradictory outcomes and the resulting benefits are also acknowledged.

Perhaps the world's first peace garden, the Cleveland Cultural Gardens embody the history of twentieth-century America and reveal the complex interrelations between art and place. This essay uses the Cleveland Cultural Gardens as a lens through which to explore how art and place have intersected over time. It explores how communities have negotiated questions of national, ethnic, and American identity and embedded those identities into the vernacular landscape. It considers how the particulars of place were embedded into a public garden and asks whether it is possible for public art to transcend its place—both in terms of geography and history. In some sense, the Gardens have transcended their place, but in others respects, their fortunes were bound inextricably to that place, to the economic, demographic, and cultural contours that shaped and reshaped Northern Ohio. As works of art, the Cleveland Cultural Gardens both have reflected the history of Cleveland and American industrial cities during the 20th century and revealed something of the dynamics that underscored the changing character of public art and gardens in American cities.

Getting food to our plates has become a highly complex, industrialised and globalised process. However, transformations in how our food is supplied are not without resistance. Initiatives are emerging that take a step back to simpler, alternative methods of food supply, bringing the producer and consumer closer together. Alternative food initiatives which are commonly found in Ireland include allotments, community gardens, farmers' markets, farm shops and on-farm food enterprises. Understanding alternative food activities as a social movement can illuminate a fresh perspective on their nature and potential. While briefly considering the broad dynamics of alternative food activity in Ireland, this exploratory paper looks at the question of the nature of resistance and whether a collective vision may exist across initiatives, illustrated by two examples, a community garden and consumer food co-op. Finally some conclusions as to how alternative food initiatives may play a transformative role within the contemporary food system are discussed.

The early nineteenth-century asylum in Britain was generally sited upon a hill with wide-ranging rural views, surrounded by agricultural land, gardens and landscaped grounds. A number of historians have discussed the role of these features as places for patients to partake in recreation, exercise and work. This paper will add to this literature by exploring the possibility that, alongside this active participation and interaction, the passive experience of viewing the landscape and the location of the asylum within a rural setting were also expected to have a therapeutic role.

This is a reconstruction of the career of the Most Reverend Dom Frei Cipriano de São José and the historical garden he built for his palace in Mariana, Minas Gerais, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The grounds, which, like most of their counterparts in Minas Gerais, contained an orchard and kitchen garden, underwent a major reform to fit the mold of the classical European garden. Orderly and showing aesthetic concern, they were an admirable space at the end of the colonial period, representing as they did the enlightened metropolitan elite's growing interest in natural history and botany. A variety of documental sources were used to reconstruct the history of the grounds and the career of the person behind their design, the enlightened Dom Frei Cipriano de São José.

The Royal College of Physicians of London (RCP) was founded in the City of London in 1518 and at that time many of the royal, religious and lay residences had gardens. The gardens were used, among other things, to grow fruit trees, herbs for the kitchen and for strewing on the floor, and for leisure, with lawns, bowling and flowers. So it would have been natural for the RCP Fellows to wish to have a garden of their own. This was not possible until the College moved into its second and third homes in the City in 1614 and 1674 and good street plans of these sites, and of their gardens, have now become available, though we lack any details of the planting. The fourth home in Pall Mall East in 1815 was landlocked. Therefore when the fifth (and current) home in Regent's Park was opened in 1964 it was splendid to have a large garden, carefully designed, planted and recorded. In 2004 a wonderful transformation took place when the College created a modern physic garden showing the development of medicinal plants through the ages and in many parts of the world.

The aim of the present work is to make a detailed investigation of the dissemination and dispersion of the plants which were cultivated in Medea's garden of medical plants in Colchis. It was found that the plants in the Medea's garden were highly heterogeneous from the point of plant geography. Plants from humid and arid Mediterranean basin, Near, Minor and East Asia zones were found in Medea's garden. Among the most important were the plants of floristic centers of Mediterranean basin. Study of the botanical geographical aspects of medical plants gave us opportunities to establish optimal time of dissemination of medical plants diasporas in Colchis; this process is associated with climate oscillations of Holocene and intensive migrations of peoples of Mediterranean.

Biographical information is provided for Daniel Chambers Macreight. He worked in Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle's herbarium at Geneva during the early 1830s, and later in the decade was prominent in medico-botanical circles in London. Macreight retired in 1840, due to ill-health, and moved to Jersey in the Channel Islands where he died. In 1837, he published an innovative "Manual of the British flora" which covered both native and cultivated plants. This flora contained two novel features: dichotomous keys were provided to assist students to identify plants, and the category subspecies was employed for taxa within the genera "Rosa," "Rubus" and "Salix."

Edinburgh has had eight physic gardens on different sites since its first one was created by the Incorporation of Barbers and Surgeons in 1656. As the gardens grew in size, they evolved from herb gardens to botanic gardens with small herbaria for the supply of medical herbs. They were intended for the instruction of medical, surgical and apothecary students and, in the case of the physicians, to demonstrate the need for a physicians' college and a pharmacopoeia. Some of the doctors in charge of them were equally famous and influential in botany as in medicine, and while Edinburgh Town Council enjoyed the fame the gardens brought to the city it was parsimonious and slow to support its botanical pioneers. The gardens are celebrated today in the Sibbald Garden within the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

British imperial expansion opened up new worlds for naturalists to collect and catalogue many species of plants and animals unknown in Europe. David Douglas' travels to the northwest region of North America in the 1820s exemplified, in many ways, the science of empire. Under the aegis of the Hudson's Bay Company, the main representative of British influence in the Northwest, Douglas was able to journey throughout the region and collect a significant number of plants that found their way into British gardens. Yet Douglas was not only a collector aided by imperial institutions, but also, through his expertise, an agent of imperialism.