The Dominion of Flowers: Botanical Art & Global Plant Relations by Mark Laird Published Today

Mark Laird’s new book, The Dominion of Flowers: Botanical Art & Global Plant Relations, is now available.

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. This provocative new book – part art history, part polemic – weaves fine art, botanical illustration and previously unpublished archival material into a political and ethical account of Britain’s heritage, showing how plants were not only integral to English gardens of the Georgian and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.

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.

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.

Published by the Paul Mellon Centre, The Dominion of Flowers: Botanical Art & Global Plant Relations can be purchased via Yale University Press.