After the American Revolution, the United States gained a problem with no clear answer. Independence had not produced a unified nation. Instead, it introduced questions about how to construct a national identity. In the generations after the war, the stakes felt higher as geographic divergences in labor and economics increased and threatened to break the union. Inquiry into the foundations of the nation filtered through society into spaces seemingly far from governing institutions. The exceptional environmental riches of the United States provided one basis for a unified identity. Connecting nature to nation offered ostensible certainties.Rather than pinpointing stable markers, Mary Kuhn's study puts into relief how observations about the nation's environment, specifically its soil and plant life, introduced uncertainties. Technologies and infrastructures that promoted the circulation of words and plant life played a part in shaping the political culture of the 19th-century United States. New encounters with plant life from distant parts of the world, an array of agricultural experiments, and the cultivation of private gardens gave individuals a chance to reflect on the links between local circumstances and larger political questions.Working across literary, technical, pedagogical, and commercial sources, Kuhn nimbly weaves together scales and dynamics of botanic investigation, print culture, and political developments. Her narrative bridges the decades of U.S. history marked by expansion, imperialism, and consolidation, as slavery deepened existing fractures. She argues that American gardeners “understood the plants they encountered at home as political objects swept up in the scientific and environmental changes of nineteenth-century imperialism” (5). Kuhn engages with many well-known writers of the era, including Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass. No matter how personal and tied to local contexts these writers were, they engaged deeply in the wider world.Didactic texts such as Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps’ Familiar Lectures on Botany (1829) supplied straightforward lessons on virtue, utility, and nationalism—all specifically aimed at women. Plants provided useful rhetoric to discuss a developing and expanding nation and its inhabitants. The correct type of cultivation in the land and people reflected well on the nation. But other works, such as Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1824), employed botanical tropes with greater ambiguity. Kuhn describes Hobomok as a “botanical hybrid” in describing the relationship between a white woman and Native man (45). This hybrid, both national and imperial in its construction, encouraged readers to understand the “polity in natural terms” (56). Nathaniel Hawthorne, an avid amateur gardener, counted Robert Manning, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, as an uncle. Familiarity with innovations in plant cultivation informed Hawthorne's work, such as “Rappaccini's Daughter,” a story of a botanist whose daughter becomes an integral and poisonous part of his experimentation. The widespread entry of plant life into domestic settings gave writers a platform to elaborate on emerging issues about the impact of new technologies, and implications like the shakiness of gender roles within the family.Early Americans found that plant life and the natural world could not wholly be kept under human control. Plants evaded the boundaries of controlled environments. Some thinkers came to believe plants and other species were capable of intelligence and sentience. Emily Dickinson's poetry charts the possibility that “Butterflies from Santo Domingo/Cruising round the purple line/Have a system of aesthetics—/Far superior to mine” (115). Resisting the instrumentalization of other species as simply resources for human use, Dickinson expresses the limits of human subjectivity and anxieties around environmental change. Plants served as more than simple proxies or pedagogical tools, actually experiencing the world on their own terms.Throughout The Garden Politic, Kuhn notes an ongoing imperative to consider plant life simply through utility, since plant life allowed writers to articulate potentially subversive ideas in oblique fashion. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), an abolitionist novel published after Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), presents the swamp in contrast to the plantation. If slavery depended on “strict regimes of classification linked to equally strict practices of cultivation” the swamp with its thriving plant life offered a replacement (121). Stowe's attention to the details of the swamp mirrored her treatment of interior domestic spaces in Dred, and conveyed that the swamp was a domestic space for those escaping slavery.Even though the swamp provided a natural argument for abolition, the place of agriculture as a motor for racial advancement in a post-emancipation United States remained unclear especially with limited land redistribution. But there were promising signs, even from sources such as scientific agriculture, which had been wielded to perpetuate slavery. When reflecting upon a fruitful pumpkin patch that he cultivated, Frederick Douglass noted: “Although the soil is American, it took no offense on account of our color—but yielded a generous return for our industry” (144). The earth, unlike the United States, bore no “prejudice against color” and nature was “no respecter of persons.” Douglass' pumpkins take on greater significance against Thomas Carlyle's defense of white racial superiority and dismissal of pumpkins as a symbol of the economic and social turmoil that emancipation later brought. A divergent understanding of cultivation signaled more than a disagreement over plants, but one where the stakes were the very structure of the nation.How should we think of plants today? Kuhn concludes with this question. A book on environmental humanities, no matter its chronological or geographic focus, eventually seeks to address our current environmental crises. In part this is to argue for the relevance of historical and literary work. Raising the question acknowledges how far—and how close—we are to the past. Reflections on plants, as Kuhn shows, present the possibility of imagining new and as yet unarticulated political futures. Human beings have wrested control out of nature. Yet we have also learned that our world is not wholly of our own making, and the lack of certainty in such a conclusion is meant to be a strength.
Pollyanna Rhee (Mon,) studied this question.