This project investigates how early modern European gardeners and horticulturalists constructed and designed artificial environments for cultivating diverse plants from around the world. It seeks to better understand the role of horticultural expertise in the history of natural history, science, and art.

Gardens were important places for plant studies and the production of botanical books in the early modern period. As scholars have shown, gardens frequently provided access to specimens that were not native and were rare to Europe. The living plant collections in private princely or liefhebber gardens and/or semi-public university or city gardens offered naturalists a means to study and write many descriptions of plants from the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Early modern gardens also actively produced new cultivars of flowers and fruit, leading to greater varieties of productive and ornamental plants for research and usage. The flourishing botanical interests required the expertise and knowledge of gardeners and horticulturalists, who built suitable environments where the plants could thrive and bred new cultivars. In addition to serving as containers of plant species and laboratories for breeding varieties, gardens were aesthetic experiences for visitors. People encountered (rare) plant collections within the larger landscape design of a site that often included formal parterres, iconographical program(s), waterwork, and other elements.

Green-thumbed knowledge looks into how gardeners and horticulturalists worked with local climates and natural environments to construct artificial habitats for plants, such as dealing with land management, soil preparation, and climate control, among other challenges. It studies how gardeners and horticulturalists produced new plant varieties through experimentation before the science of hybridization was fully understood. This project further asks how gardeners and horticulturalists balanced the challenges of cultivating plants and designing aesthetic experiences, considering the forms, colors (and sometimes fragrances) of plants when situating them within the landscape designs. The main areas of focus are the Low Countries and England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This research especially pays attention to how people with horticultural expertise recorded and communicated such gardening practices and practical knowledge through text and images.

This project aims to reframe the significance of early modern gardens and gardening by emphasizing practical knowledge. Even though there are studies on gardens and horticulture in several fields, they tend to value only selected aspect(s) of the garden. For example, climate control structures such as orangeries and hothouses have been of interest in the history of (garden) technology. Historians of art and architecture usually focus on garden designs, while historians of science (including natural history) primarily research plant collections. Early modern gardens, however, were multisensory spaces where all these different aspects contributed to how plants were studied and experienced. Turning to horticultural practice, expertise, and knowledge enables this project to examine all these aspects together and see how natural history was designed to be experienced in such artificially constructed natural environments.

Bio

Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the project BIO&IMAGO at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research interests stand at the intersection of the history of art, knowledge, science and technology, and the book. Chen defended her PhD thesis at Utrecht University in December 2023 on the forms of knowledge and the making of seventeenth-century florilegia, which will be published as a monograph by Brill Publishing in 2025. This research project was funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and received a fellowship from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in the USA. Chen has also published on the woodblock-making and printing of botanical woodcuts at the early modern Plantin Press in Antwerp. Additionally, Chen is a maker of images and objects with a background and training as an illustrator.

Personal website: https://jessieweihsuanchen.com/