The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America by Mary Kuhn (review)

Reviewed by: The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America by Mary Kuhn Kerry Dean Carso (bio) Keywords Botany, Horticulture, Gardening, Environmental studies The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America. By Mary Kuhn. (New York: New York University Press, 2023. Pp. 255. Cloth, 89. 00; paper, 30. 00. ) In 1866, Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend, "My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles" (10). Included in the introduction to Mary Kuhn's excellent book, this quotation encapsulates Kuhn's project, which is to analyze nineteenth-century American literature alongside the importance of plants—in the fields of horticulture, botany, and agriculture—on a scale that is both global and intimately domestic. Kuhn begins with the 1820s and focuses on the East Coast, and the Northeast in particular, because of the region's early interest in botany and horticulture. Kuhn's core argument is 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 writes about authors who were also gardeners, including Lydia Marie Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass, devoting a chapter to each writer. While this structure is typical of literary criticism, the book is interdisciplinary, providing a rich historical context featuring the global politics and scientific understanding of the period in a series of thematic chapters. Kuhn interrogates her main literary texts by surrounding them with lesser-known writings, including everything from a book on botanical approaches to healing (J. W. Cooper's The Experienced Botanist or Indian Physician, Being a New System of Practice Founded on Botany, published in 1833) and a botanical textbook for girls (Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps's Familiar Lectures on Botany, published in 1829) to a speech by the president of the Massachusetts Horticulture Society in 1848, reprinted in The Horticulturist. These extraliterary sources enliven and enrich Kuhn's analyses of works by canonical authors. Kuhn approaches her subject from three scales: "the global scale of imperial bioprospecting, the national scale in which plants were essential to establishing American political power and identity, and the local scale of the domestic garden" (7). In so doing, Kuhn provides us with new interpretations. She argues, for instance, that Emily Dickinson's poems "take on new meaning when read alongside the circulation of plants across the nineteenth century that End Page 157 made foreign flora accessible to American home gardens" (92). Her approach manages to be both far-reaching and regional, providing an enlightening new way of looking at her material. Kuhn's analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Rappaccini's Daughter" illustrates her methodology, which she describes as "materialist" and "historicist" (19). The story takes place in Padua, Italy, and features a young Italian man named Giovanni, who falls in love with Beatrice, the daughter of the experimental botanist Rappaccini. In tending the garden of poisonous plants in the garden below Giovanni's window, Beatrice becomes toxic herself, a tragic story that, according to Kuhn, "produces fascination and horror" (63). Kuhn argues that "Rappaccini's Daughter" conflates the functions of gardens as either masculine spaces for scientific experimentation or female spaces of virtue, "demonstrating how the domestic garden was increasingly a site of botanical innovation that collapsed the gendered garden binary" (64). In making this argument, Kuhn references scholarship about miscegenation in Hawthorne's story, as well as describing Padua's horticultural history and greenhouse construction in Europe. Kuhn provides the reader with an understanding of plant life in the nineteenth century, including discussions among naturalists as to whether plants may have sentient agency, a theory that could have taken Kuhn in a an ecogothic, uncanny direction, especially in her discussion of Hawthorne. Instead, Kuhn's scholarship works parallel to the emerging field of ecogothic literary criticism. An example is the new online journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic (https: //gothicnaturejournal. com/). 1 However, Kuhn does not singularly focus on gothic literary works, and her expansive reach is a welcome addition to the scholarship dealing with. . .