The British Arboretum: Trees, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Paul A. Elliott, Charles Watkins, and Stephen Daniels (review)

Like so many Victorian cultural artifacts, Victorian trees became an important repository of cultural values. As Paul A. Elliott, Charles Watkins, and Stephen Daniels demonstrate, nineteenth-century arboretums—defined as “special places for the cultivation and display of a wide variety of both deciduous and coniferous trees”—captured a range of aspirations and anxieties about everything from aesthetics to social class, scientific taxonomies, the culture of collecting, and the rise of the professions (1). British arboretums have not yet been studied much, the authors note, in large part because longstanding historical attention to the enclosure movement has encouraged the belief that British woodlands had been virtually cleared away by 1800. The startling truth is that the land of Sherwood Forest and Birnam Wood was already one of the least forested nations in Europe by the late seventeenth century—and saw a large increase of woodland, rather than ongoing devastation, during the Georgian decades. Another startling truth: the biodiversity of native British trees was likewise among the lowest in Europe, with fewer than thirty broadleaved species and five evergreen species considered indigenous, a condition that led Victorian dendrologists like John Claudius Loudon to argue strongly for the large-scale importation of exotic species. Elliott, Watkins, and Daniels bring the disciplinary principles of cultural and rural geography to bear upon the nineteenth-century fascination with trees and their spaces, a lens that has ably equipped them to discern the conflicting roles that trees were made to play in Victorian Britain.

The British Arboretum is divided into three broad sections. The first section chronicles the rise of arboretums in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, underscoring in particular their taxonomic significance; the second illuminates the important position that Loudon assumed in the establishment of arboretums throughout the nineteenth century, both as the author of Arboretum Britannicum (1838), his magnum opus, and as the designer of important sites like the Derby Arboretum; and the third considers the variable spaces of arboretums on landed estates and in public parks, analyzing these different sites as “living museums” and linking arborial specimens to the Victorian culture of collecting (8). The three sections persuasively make the case for the cultural significance of arboretums by focusing on their emergence, their single greatest champion, and their position within the larger culture.

Along with the establishment of plantations and new attention to traditional woodland management, arboretums were a partial response to the problem of deforestation. Trees had long been economically central to many trades, but the importation of new exotic species gave them a strong aesthetic and social appeal as well, with the landed gentry using groves of trees as a method of estate improvement. As the authors demonstrate, this increasing taste for specialty trees influenced the course of taxonomic history, redirecting botanists and arborists away from the Linnaean system (which had become standard in Britain by the end of the eighteenth century) and toward what might be called a Candollean natural system of classification, a system that emphasized plant morphology over the linnaean emphasis on the reproductive elements of flowers and fruit. The authors convincingly argue that the nineteenth-century interest in trees spurred this move toward a Candollean taxonomy, even as this natural taxonomy itself encouraged an intensified fascination with new arborial species.

As a gardener and landscape designer who also promoted the horticultural uses of botany, Loudon is a crucial figure in the nineteenth-century history of arboretums. Elliott, Watkins, and Daniels designate his Arboretum Britannicum as “the most important systematic study of hardy British trees and shrubs to have been published in the past two centuries, and arguably ever” (83). They accordingly provide a lengthy description of this important volume, a description that could have been usefully abbreviated and sharpened. Their emphasis on Loudon’s efforts to mix science with horticulture, though, is welcome...