The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, the Quest to Make It Bloom, and the World It Created by Tatiana Holway (review)

Organizing a research project around the cultural history of a single species of plant is inherently interdisciplinary. By tracing European, especially British, interest in the tropical water lily now known to science as Victoria amazonica, Holway integrates nineteenth-century botany with geography, horticulture, architecture, and politics, beginning with the first British discovery of the plant in Guiana (1837), and culminating in the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London. As Holway weaves multiple disciplines into the lily’s story, various rivalries in England take center stage. The natural history of Victoria is equally remarkable, but for that subject, one should turn to Anisko’s Victoria The Seductress: A Cultural and Natural History of the World’s Greatest Water Lily, also published in 2013.¹ Neither author cites the other. Both subtitles taken together convey the fascination that Western observers have shown for Victoria from their first awareness of it.

Holway controls her narrative by pursuing it steadily from a British point of view. For example, she treats earlier Europeans’ sightings of the lily in its native rivers briefly and only in relation to England’s “first” and, to some extent, mendacious claim. Holway is compelling, as well as entertaining, in her analysis of intra-British rivalries between the Royal Geographical Society and the Horticultural Society, or between botanists John Lindley and William J. Hooker.

Holway’s discussion of the British politics surrounding Victoria is the strongest part of her book; she has made good use of primary materials, especially letters preserved by the institutions that sponsored their authors. For the early history of the exploration and first mapping of the lily’s native habitat in South America, Holway largely relies on Riviere’s The Guiana Travels of Robert Schomburgk.² For the period beginning with Joseph Paxton’s arrival at Chatsworth as the head gardener of William Cavendish, the sixth Duke of Devonshire, in 1826, Holway appropriately relies on the largely unpublished primary materials housed at Chatsworth, especially the duke’s diaries and letters, as well as the correspondence of Paxton and his wife. These primary sources undergird her use of Colquhoun’s recent biography of Paxton.³

Holway’s style is comfortably balanced between the academic and the popular, well documented but also attentive to readers, and sometimes delightfully humorous. Although her disparate threads are smoothly interwoven, Holway’s storytelling sometimes relies too much on what “must have” happened when her factual information runs thin, forcing her to resort to such general cultural background material as Charles Dickens’ novels. Fortunately, Dickens also wrote a detailed account of the Crystal Palace for his magazine Household Words—a text that supports Holway’s thesis directly: When Victoria amazonica became an emblem of the queen’s empire, claiming, naming, and bringing it into flower ahead of all rival gardeners became worth the concentrated effort of a number of Britain’s most distinguished men and the institutions, both private and public, that supported them.⁴