Chinese Flowers and the Idea of Cultivation in Early-Nineteenth-Century British Word and Image

This essay uses the example of the Chinese tree peony, a flower much desired by British gardeners at the start of the nineteenth century as well as a flower much reproduced in horticultural periodicals and on consumer commodities, to explain the era's interconnected understanding of the process of cultivation. Organic cultivations, foreign and domestic, were not separated from social and personal cultivations in verbal and visual discourse but rather mutually reinforced each other. Following these connections helps explain the ever-growing estrangement between nineteenth-century subjects and the nature that surrounded them in terms that connect environmental, aesthetic, and literary history.