Plants and Gardens as Artefacts in Transcultural Contexts

This edited volume explores the ways in which the object biography or object itinerary approach could be adapted to frame research on animate objects, such as plants and gardens in transcultural contexts. By treating these animate elements as 'objects' in the manner of artefacts and looking at their individual histories, we gain a more nuanced sense of how data accumulated, how new knowledge developed through printed texts and specimen collections, and how the creators of gardens or landscapes formed their collections. Chapters explore the shifts in meanings when objects from diverse origins meet in new cultural contexts where their new owners create assemblages based on their perception of the world. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, material culture, and cultural geography.

Minna Törmä is an honorary senior lecturer research fellow in the history of art at the University of Glasgow and adjunct professor of art history at the University of Helsinki.

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Chapter 1 Introduction Minna Törmä Part I Chapter 2 Seventeenth-century Dutch ventures in the global rhubarb trade Anne Gerritsen Chapter 3 Breadfruit itineraries Sarah Easterby-Smith Chapter 4 Rootless Orchids could travel: Transplanting a Chinese plant iconography in the early modern world Yizhou Wang Part II Chapter 5 Concordia Discors: The 'natural' style in Alexander Pope's grotto - from a 'nymphaeum' to a 'mine' Yue Zhuang Chapter 6 Questioning 'Japaneseness' in the Broughton House Garden Minna Törmä Chapter 7 East Asian inspired gardens in Sweden: Expressions of material culture and cultural encounters Catharina Nolin Chapter 8 Monet's Pond in Tokyo: Global circulation of waterscape aesthetics and the politics of ecological curation Ewa Machotka and Takehiro Watanabe Bibliography Index