Notes
Notes chapter 1: introduction Epigraph: Wallace, “Part of a Journal” (1700), 539, quoted by William T. Stearn, “Linnaeus’s Sexual System of Classification,” in Linnaeus, Species Plantarum, 1: 25. 1. Bill Brown, “The Secret Life of Things,” 3. My reading of botany as plant matter recalls, in a different time and place, Brown’s analysis of labor in The Material Unconscious, 11. 2. Brown, “The Secret Life of Things,” 10, quoting Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 191. 3. Oerlemans uses the phrase material sublime in Romanticism to characterize the romantic response to an alienated material world (202–210). I use it rather to emphasize the pull of the material and the singular against romanticism’s most elevated conceptual ambitions as Schwartz describes it in Wormwork. Gigante examines ugly or monstrous aesthetics in Life, 223–224. In Ugly Feelings, Ngai assesses the conjunction of aesthetic feeling and ugliness, 6 and 279–297. 4. Wallace, “Journal,” 539–540. Wallace was the first European naturalist to work in Panama. The next botanical exploration there occurred in 1790. See Dwyer, “A Note on Plant Collectors,” 107–108. Wallace’s rather cheerful view of Darien contrasts sharply with that of earlier visitors. In 1700 he asserted, “the Soil is rich, the Air good and temperate, the Water is sweet, and every thing contributes to make it healthful and convenient.” In 1514 Peter Martyn warned, “Darien is pernicious, unwholesome and outrageous,” and in 1715 Rev. Francis Borland, a survivor of the ill-fated Scottish colony, bitterly quoted Martyn, then addressed Darien itself as “thou Land devourest men and eatest up thy inhabitants.” See Borland, Memoirs of Darien, 18. Wallace’s enthusiasm for the place may convey his delight with its tropical flora and fauna. A half-century later, after exotic plants had found their way into many English gardens, Horace Walpole wryly noted the reverse confusion: “My present and sole occupation is planting , in which I have made great progress, and talk very learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now and then a lettuce run to seed overturns all my botany, as I have more than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub.” Walpole is here writing to Henry Seymour Conway, 29 Aug. 1748, quoted by Laird from the epigraph to The Flowering of the Landscape Garden. 5. Brown, “The Secret Life of Things,” 5. 6. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 374–375. 7. Drayton, Nature’s Government; Grove, Green Imperialism; Bewell, “Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature,” 19–48; Kumar, Science and Empire; Miller and Reill, Visions of Empire; Casid, Sowing Empire; and Tobin, Colonizing Nature. 264 n o t e s t o pa g e s 4 – 1 3 8. Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses, 129–130, 135–156. 9. Daston and Galison, among many others, argue against Foucault for a more gradualist account of the rupture that Foucault describes: Objectivity, 375. 10. Foucault, Order of Things, xv, 135, 155. 11. François, Open Secrets, 8–9 and 37. The argument made by François about plants is muted, half-glimpsed in her trenchant account of how openness and a wise passivity (of the kind that Wordsworth’s nature invites and the redwoods of Northern California offer) oppose a more aggressive and violent wrenching of meaning and putative secrets. 12. Mitchell reflects on speculative consequences of romantic fascination with plants in “Cryptogamia,” 631–651. 13. Cesalpino, “Dedication,” quoted by Pavord, Naming of Names, 239. 14. Larson, Reason and Experience, 36. 15. William T. Stearn, introduction, Linnaeus, Species Plantarum, 1:24–35. 16. Jardine discusses amateur and professional engagement with natural history in the eighteenth century in Scenes of Inquiry, 16–17. 17. Gigante echoes the antimony between mechanism and vitalism that has long shaped critical discussion of romantic nature(s) in Life: Organic Form and Romanticism. 18. Cesalpino, “Dedication,” De plantis libri XVI; quoted by Pavord, Naming of Names, 232. 19. Stevens notes that for A.-L. de Jussieu, who worked out the first one hundred families of the Natural System in 1789, differentiae refers to the external features of plants. The term characters is sometimes used as a synonym: Stevens, The Development of Biological Systematics, 30; Morton, History of Botanical Science, 126, refers to internal features that “indicated the organization of plants and hence their true nature.” 20. Ray, preface to Methodus plantarum nova, n.p. I have slightly altered the English translation from that presented in Pavord, Naming of Names, 282–283. Early in their long correspondence, Collinson told Bartram, “It...
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