Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art, Giovanni Aloi, Yale University Press, £30

At the end of the Afghan-Soviet war in the late 1980s, weavers in Afghanistan’s carpet heartlands set about creating rugs that depicted the Soviet army withdrawing. These ‘exit rugs’ featured armoured vehicles surrounded by flowers, and helicopters under fire hovering above shrubs in bloom. The meaning of these botanical motifs is debatable. The flowers perhaps symbolised joy at the Soviet retreat or were maybe a nod to opium poppies (more recently, Taliban authorities banned the crop). Whatever the case, the art of incorporating traditional floral medallions with heavy combat scenes makes these rugs aesthetically compelling, and interesting as knotted histories.

It may be obvious to point out that flowers and botanics in art – whether woven or painted – often act as metaphors or else carry hidden messages and their exact meanings, and the artist’s intention, can be hard to decipher. In Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art, the author and curator Giovanni Aloi urges us to take botanical representations in art altogether more seriously. Such a topic demands a suitably lush and illustrated book, and this one, spread over seven chapters, is undeniably beautiful to look at, but it is also much more than that. It is a book that is good to think with, highly philosophical in its musings, and boundary-pushing in its theories.

Aloi argues that the enormous contribution of plants to the art world strays far beyond their literal offerings and uses – as pigments, papers and subjects – and that art historians and critics in their commentaries have failed to give the botanical world its fair due, leaving plant life unfairly sidelined. On this topic, Robert Hughes, the celebrated Australian art critic, once wrote: ‘To many people botanical subjects seem not altogether serious… a kind of pictorial relaxation, an easy matter compared to landscape or the human figure.’

Only by seeing plants as active participants in the creative process, instead of passive things, and by pushing aside the predictable focus on human artistic prowess, can we begin to see botanical art as more of a partnership, a case of artists ‘co-authoring with vegetal collaborators’. Presenting an alternative history of art is no easy feat but Aloi is certain that it is made possible by positioning plants at the centre of its story ‘who do not care about art as we do’. At the heart of the book is an acknowledgment that our tendency towards human exceptionalism over plants and animals has not only been reductive but has also affected our relationship with the making of art.

Spanning the centuries, the book opens with Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble sculpture, Apollo and Daphne (1622), depicting Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel tree, through to a photograph of Brain Forest Quipu, an installation by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, which appeared in Tate Modern’s giant Turbine Hall in 2022-23. It is a fitting image to conclude with. The quipu is an ancient South American communication system made up of a forest of knotted threads. In Vicuña’s hands it becomes not only a symbol for collective thinking; its bleached appearance suggests deforestation and the exile of indigenous cultures from their traditional woodlands.

The artworks selected in between, to illustrate Aloi’s theories, are wildly eclectic. There is Robert Mapplethorpe’s exquisite photograph, Poppy (1988), an example of flowers as symbols of desire and sexuality, and there are the Gothic stained-glass rose windows at Notre Dame Cathedral, which the author compares to a mandala, sacred circles in Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism, thus introducing a potentially new way of seeing them. The porcelain tiles that cover the Buddhist Wat Arun temple in Bangkok also make an appearance because ‘flowers bloom to see the Buddha’. And there are so many other twisting journeys. Textile designer William Morris’ focus on non-mechanised methods and vegetal dyes leads to the story of indigo, which then connects to the Tuareg tribes in the Sahara and their blue-hued robes. Then there is a 13th-century illustration on parchment that tells a story of one of the strangest plants, or rather herbs, of all: the mandrake. The artwork shows a dog on a chain running to a bowl of food and pulling out a mandrake from the earth. This is because it was thought that if a human ripped the root out the mandrake would scream so loudly that it would kill anyone within earshot. In this case, the dog would die but the herbalist would get their mandrake. Aloi points out that, back then, possession of a mandrake root – vaguely human-shaped and therefore ripe for legend through the ages – meant possible witchcraft and being burned alive.

Aloi is at his most convincing when examining cultures in which plants have long been viewed as allies. He takes as an example the First Nations artist Abie Loy Kemarre and her Bush Medicine Leaves (2020), and points out that in indigenous Australian communities plants are believed to be partners, ‘profoundly entwined in lifesaving interactions and codependency’. Abie Loy Kemarre’s artwork, which is acrylic on linen, represents the acacia tenuissima (narrow-leaved wattle); as well as a plant that can be made into a medicinal ointment, it also works as a warning device. When its leaves fall to the ground it signals that snakes can be aggressive, as their mating season has begun.

The problem with any book like this, covering such an enormous topic albeit from an unusual viewpoint, is that the reader is always going to see gaps, depending on personal interests. In the section on silk and mulberries I wondered if Samarkand ought to have been mentioned (‘The world’s best paper is produced in Samarkand,’ wrote Babur, warrior prince and founder of the Mughal dynasty, in his book The Baburnama); in reading about botanical remedies, I thought about Armenia’s medieval elixirs and consecrated oils; when the book discusses tulips, and the infamous period of ‘tulipmania’, I felt the Ottomans were given too little space. After the first tulips arrived in Holland from Ottoman Turkey in the 16th century, Dutch gardeners created showy hybrids that caused outrage when they returned to Turkey, looking so different from the slender Ottoman specimens seen on Iznik tiles. This even contributed to the downfall of Sultan Ahmed III. None of this is the fault of the author as, in any book, selections and omissions have to take place, and in this case I found it made for a more heated, and interactive, reading experience.

There are some unexpected life lessons in the book. Aloi points out that, while other living creatures soar in the sky, trample across the land or swim in the sea, plants are rooted, gripping to the earth – an ‘art of restraint’ as he puts it – something that we might learn from. ‘This vegetal art has something to teach us about tenacity and conviction; making the most of, and thriving with, what is at hand; withstanding prolonged adversity; persevering at all costs. It is a learned form of wisdom that requires patience, resilience, adaptability, and determination. No two plant species – or even two plants of the same species, for that matter – master this form of wisdom in the same way.’