Book description
Like their penchant for clubs, cricket, and hunting, the planting of
English gardens by the British in India reflected an understandable
need on the part of expatriates to replicate home as much as possible
in an alien environment. In Flora's Empire, Eugenia W. Herbert
argues that more than simple nostalgia or homesickness lay at the root
of this "garden imperialism," however. Drawing on a wealth
of period illustrations and personal accounts, many of them little
known, she traces the significance of gardens in the long history of
British relations with the subcontinent. To British eyes, she
demonstrates, India was an untamed land that needed the visible stamp
of civilization that gardens in their many guises could convey.
Colonial gardens changed over time, from the "garden
houses" of eighteenth-century nabobs modeled on English country
estates to the herbaceous borders, gravel walks, and well-trimmed
lawns of Victorian civil servants. As the British extended their rule,
they found that hill stations like Simla offered an ideal retreat from
the unbearable heat of the plains and a place to coax English flowers
into bloom. Furthermore, India was part of the global network of
botanical exploration and collecting that gathered up the world's
plants for transport to great imperial centers such as Kew. And it is
through colonial gardens that one may track the evolution of imperial
ideas of governance. Every Government House and Residency was
carefully landscaped to reflect current ideals of an ordered society.
At Independence in 1947 the British left behind a lasting legacy in
their gardens, one still reflected in the design of parks and
information technology campuses and in the horticultural practices of
home gardeners who continue to send away to England for seeds.
"I found myself entertained on every page. Herbert's
achievement is that under the guise of a study of Britannia's role as
gardener she has written a thoroughly scholarly-indeed,
groundbreaking, in every sense of the word-history of the British
entanglement in India. She has flung her net far and wide, and drawn
in a wealth of unfamiliar sources, both exotic and homely, to build up
a rich tapestry of the Indian landscape. . . . full of insights and
wonderfully readable, Flora's Empire is as much a treat for the
general reader as it is for those who relish 'the glory of the
garden.'"-Charles Allen, editor of Plain Tales from the Raj
Eugenia W. Herbert is Professor Emeritus of History at Mount Holyoke
College and the author of several books, including Twilight on the
Zambezi: Late Colonialism in Central Africa.
