The plants that made the modern world

The history of plants and flowers is intimately and intriguingly bound up with the history of exploration and adventure. John Tradescant the Younger, an early 17th-century gardener, travelled to Virginia in the 1630s, bringing back phlox, asters, jasmine and columbines to Britain. Sixty years later, the intrepid Dutch widow Maria Sibylla Merian set sail for Suriname, eager to sketch insects and plants. Mark Catesby, a naturalist, trekked hundreds of miles across the Carolinas in the 1720s on foot, horseback and by canoe, gathering plant and seed samples. And pity the young illustrator Sydney Parkinson, who joined the first voyage of Captain James Cook’s HMS Endeavour (1768-71) and made around 1,000 botanical sketches, only to die of a fever on the return journey. Brave, determined people, all of them.

In Bloom, a new exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, introduces us to these and other pioneering figures who travelled the world to document plants and transport them home, initially in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, later in the pursuit of money. Oxford being Oxford, the curators have barely had to look beyond the city’s limits to find how to tell this global story. Many of the paintings, etchings, maps, ceramics, books and flowers on display have been drawn from the university’s own rich collections: those of the Ashmolean, as well as the Bodleian Library, the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Department of Biology’s ‘Herbaria’, which holds over a million historic plant specimens. The exhibits include botanical drawings, treatises on the cultivation of kitchen gardens, fat tomes filled with pressed flowers collected 350 years ago, even a special wooden-and-glass cabinet, the ‘Wardian case’, which was used to transport delicate plants across continents and keep them fed and watered.

As seeds and bulbs traversed the Silk Road alongside spices, flowers took on the status of luxurious commodities. Tulips – easy to dismiss as cheap supermarket blooms today – created a ‘mania’ on their arrival in the Netherlands in the 1630s, when a single bulb, which might or might not yield a gaily striped flower, could sell for more than the cost of a canal-side house. Exotic flora long remained symbolic of cosmopolitan tastes and wealth. A gorgeous 1932 oil painting on display here, Herbert Davis Richter’s The Indian Shawl, juxtaposes Himalayan rhododendrons alongside an expensive Kashmir shawl, a Chinese ceramic figurine and an Asian lacquered chest.

How limited our gardens and our floral bouquets would have been without transnational exchange. A delicate watercolour by John Ruskin from 1871 reminds us that native British roses were limited to the wild or dog rose, such as might be found in a cottage garden – pretty enough, but very different from the almost limitless, highly cultivated varieties and colours available today, many of which are derived from types originally native to China.

Flowers have long been associated with love, or at least sensuality: think of Alexandre Dumas’ novel-turned-play La Dame aux Camélias, the literary source for Verdi’s La traviata, where the white or red camellias the heroine wears signal her ‘availability’ or otherwise at different times of the month. Flowers’ romantic symbolism is best summed up in the Ashmolean’s exhibition by Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting, in which the subject gazes out languidly from behind a bunch of voluptuous orchids, a not-so-coded reference to the sitter’s desire. There is even something rather creepily priapic about waxy-looking papier-mâché teaching models under bell jars, used to illustrate the systematic classification of plants based on sexual organs. And at one of several ‘scent installations’ dotted through the exhibition, we have the opportunity to inhale a damask rose scent of sweet, heady allure.

Flowers and plants have long been exploited for other types of comfort and stimulation. By the 18th century, the potential to use poppies from the South Caucasus to create a painkilling opioid was finding useful application on the battlefield, but soon these flowers would be put to life-ruining rather than life-giving ends. Display cabinets present Chinese opium pipes and implements for the collection of poppy resin. I approached a smelling booth that promised to evoke the interior of an opium den with some trepidation: the scent was elusive, enigmatic, undeniably seductive. Flowers can be beautiful – as captured most delicately here by Henri Fantin-Latour’s Still Life of Pink, White and Yellow Roses (1894) – but they can also be dangerous, or decadent. Painters of still lives loved a floral display that was heading for decay, and that charming striped tulip in your kitchen vase only looks that way as the result of a virus.

The story told here is inescapably bound up with empire, which allowed Europeans not only to exploit the natural resources of distant lands – cotton, tea, rubber – but also to under-appreciate indigenous people who contributed to projects documenting plant life. (An attractive early 19th-century watercolour by Vishnu Prasad from the Botanical Garden in Calcutta, which shows the influence of Indian illustrative styles on botanical art, is a rare example of such work to be given an attribution.) Unlike so many contemporary exhibitions, this is one that melds politics, social history and objects in a way that feels natural, effective and informative. Only in the final room, which showcases contemporary oversized photographs of hollyhocks and peonies, and chintzy pink and purple tapestries, does an element of artificial preaching creep in. (A ‘political’ artwork, where you must read an accompanying caption on the wall to get the point, never quite convinces.)

Like Money Talks: Art Society and Power, an exhibition the Ashmolean hosted in 2024-25, In Bloom takes a wide-ranging and eclectic approach, cramming a vast number of objects and perspectives into a relatively modest exhibition space. There is much to learn about here and much to wonder at in terms of sheer beauty, from a gorgeous cushion-plump sunflower from the Duchess of Beaufort’s early 18th-century Florilegium to Laura Silburn’s delicate 2018 evocation of the aesthetic appeal of ferns. With things to say about sickness, health, love, death, money, imagination and sheer resourcefulness, the history of the quest for plants turns out to mirror the history of humanity itself.

In Bloom: How Plants Changed our World is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford until 16 August, 2026.