Public science in the private garden: Noblewomen horticulturalists and the making of British botany c. 1785–1810

Abstract

This study considers three noblewomen – Lady Amelia Hume (1751–1809), Jane Barrington (1733–1807), and Mary Watson-Wentworth, Marchioness of Rockingham (c. 1735–1804) – whose contributions to plant studies were so important that Linnean Society President James Edward Smith dedicated three books to them. Their skills in cultivating newly imported exotic plants rivaled those of elite nurserymen, and taxonomists of the highest caliber came to depend on them to unlock information encoded within flowers to enable classification and publication. Eventually, the women played strategic roles within national scientific studies of the world’s plants orchestrated by Smith, Joseph Banks, and William Roxburgh. The stories of Hume, Barrington, and Rockingham complicate our understandings of the gendered, professional, and disciplinary hierarchies of knowledge that constituted British science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They also resituate the domestic hothouse as a publicly engaged laboratory and museum.