As Britain grew into an ever-expanding empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new and exotic botanical specimens began to arrive within the nation’s public and private spaces. Gardens became sites not just of leisure, sport, and aesthetic enjoyment, but also of scientific inquiry and knowledge dissemination. Medical practitioners used their botanical training to capitalize on the growing fashion for botanical collecting and agricultural experimentation in institutional, semipublic, and private gardens across Britain. This book highlights the role of these medical practitioners in the changing use of gardens in the late Georgian period, marked by a fluidity among the ideas of farm, laboratory, museum, and garden. Placing these activities within a wider framework of fashionable, scientific, and economic interests of the time, historian Clare Hickman argues that gardens shifted from predominately static places of enjoyment to key gathering places for improvement, knowledge sharing, and scientific exploration.

Contents

• [Dedication]
• Acknowledgments
• Quick Guide to the Key Medical Practitioners and Their Gardens
• INTRODUCTION: Illuminating the Doctor’s Garden
  • John Coakley Lettsom and Grove Hill
  • Rethinking the Garden
  • Crossing between the Histories of Medicine, Science, and Environmental History
  • Orientation Guide
• ONE. Educating the Senses: The Botanic Garden as a Teaching and Research Center
  • Hope’s Botanical Sensorium
  • University Botanic Gardens as Pedagogic Spaces
  • The Science of the Classroom
  • “Because a certain number of different plants, all in flower, must be had for each lecture”
  • Knowing through Sensory Engagement
• TWO. Creating a Perpetual Spring: Tracing Private Botanic Collectors and Their Networks
  • “A Sensual Botanist”
  • The Garden as a Botanical Clearinghouse
  • Bullfrogs and Tortoises
  • Invisible Garden Hands
• THREE. For “Curiosity and Instruction”: Visiting the Botanic Garden
  • “The taste for natural History is now become universal”: Publicizing the Garden to Visitors
  • “For the use of the physician, the Apothecary, the student in Physic, the scientific Farmer, the Botanist …, the lover of Flowers and the Public in general”: The London Botanic Garden
• FOUR. “Hints or Directions”: Reading the Doctor’s Garden
  • Grove Hill: A Rural and Horticultural Sketch
  • Cataloging the Collection
  • Labeling Specimens
  • A Living Library
  • Illiterate Garden Visitors
• FIVE. For Dulce and Utile: The Garden as Both Ornament and Farm
  • “Men well versed in the science as well as practice of agriculture”
  • “Trying many experiments”: John Hunter at Earl’s Court
  • Promoting a Bee Society
• SIX. This “Terrestrial Elysium”: Sociability and the Garden
  • “I have given my little cottage the name of the Temple of Vaccinia”: Medical Science and the Garden
  • The Afterlives of Gardens and Collections
• EPILOGUE: The Stories We Tell: Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice
  • Engaging Diverse Audiences
  • Storytelling
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.

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Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952843

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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