By Tatiana HolwayOxford University Press, 2013
Buoyant on the waters of the river basin, as extravagant in their scale as the leaves, some of the blossoms were cupped, just beginning to open, the hundreds of petals, straining from prickly poppy-like buds, a pure gleaming white. Others, unfurling layer upon layer, took on a pink tint that deepened as the lilies dilated into saucer-shaped flowers, their growth so rapid as to be perceptible to the eye.
Such was the sight that greeted Robert Hermann Schomburgk on January 1,1837 as he journeyed through Guiana backwaters on an expedition of discovery for the Royal Geographical Society. With eight foot leaves and twelve inch flowers thickly spread across the wide river basin, the “vegetable wonder” that Schomburgk beheld was like nothing the explorer had seen before.Tatiana Holway’s The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, the Quest to Make it Bloom, and the World it Created starts with this modest enough set-up of an explorer at the moment of discovery, from which unfolds a complex story about a flower that became one of the most evocative symbols of the Victorian age. Shipped to Britain first as a preserved specimen and later as seeds for cultivation, the water lily would spark fierce competition in the race to identify, name and then cultivate a flowering plant as spectacular as that discovered in South America. It would become entangled with the hopes of a nation on the cusp of a new age, its name symbolically yoking the new Queen to her Empire in a symbol that evoked the triumph and wonder of Imperial acquisition. Eventually, it would inspire the design of one of the most significant buildings of the century, the Crystal Palace that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Holway’s story begins with travel and adventure, following Schomburgk on his expedition to survey and map out the limits of the colony of British Guiana. On a journey beset by constant difficulties, the discovery of the water lily is a saving grace and through Holway’s telling we feel with Schomburgk all the glory of the moment : “Behold, a vegetable wonder!” he exclaims; “All calamities were forgotten. I felt as a Botanist, and felt myself rewarded.” His heroic moment is but brief: Schomburgk must struggle onwards with the expedition, and the narrative leaves him traversing South America while we follow the preserved samples, sketches and accounts of the water lily shipped back to Britain.The news of the flower’s discovery lands on British shores at the perfect moment: this was, Holway argues, as much the Age of Flowers as it was the Age of Steam and Rail. From budding amateurs to seasoned professionals, gardening was a popular pursuit: the growing middle classes enjoyed hobby gardening on the grounds of their suburban villas, while those with more money sought out the latest prized specimens for their exclusive collections. This “flower-fever” was fuelled by the influx of new discoveries from across the British Empire, as well as the emergence of a burgeoning print culture that allowed for the rapid spread of knowledge through new journals and magazines. Among the experts, scientific knowledge thrived on the import of new species and the realms of botany and horticulture advanced rapidly.
It’s with these professionals that the story of the water lily starts to become more complex: leading experts, rich patrons, and institutional establishments at the forefront of Britain’s geographical, botanical and horticultural progress, all play their part in creating a cultural sensation out of the
Victoria regia. The wonder of Holway’s telling is that she captures the manifold layers of the story, taking us down each of the intersecting paths that come to make up the history of the magnificent flower. She has a gift for fashioning a lively dialogue out of historical documents: at the forefront of this story is a strong sense of the people involved, their personalities and eccentricities, rivalries and tensions, and what they value and why. In detailing Schomburgk’s relationship with the Royal Geographical Society, for instance, Holway succinctly articulates the various pressures acting upon him:
Whatever the dangers an explorer encountered in wild unchartered lands, there were plenty of perils still to face from the cosmopolitan enclaves of science.To the men of this era, these perils were real. As they went about creating new fields of knowledge, no detail was too trivial; no error of fact or judgement was inconsequential. Reputations could be made and unmade on the smallest pretext, as Schomburgk well knew. Stuck in Guiana, he had felt every barb sent over from London during the past couple of years, and each one had smarted.
Upon the arrival of Schomburgk’s specimen in Britain the race for classification commences, and it’s a race fraught with internal rivalries between the Royal Botanical and Royal Geographical Societies. What’s at stake, Holway has us understand, isn’t just the classification of the plant but also the privilege of dedicating the flower to the new Queen, an act of naming that will both secure royal approval and serve to establish a “new myth of origin”: one “wherein a magnificent species of flower grew out of a genus identified with Britain’s new Queen.” With the name Victoria regia decided upon by John Lindley, Schomburgk’s correspondent at the Royal Geographical Society, the ambitions of the new age were captured in a flower which represented the beauty, grandeur and luxury of imperial discovery – and obscured any hint of the darker underside of those gains.From here, the story becomes about the quest becomes one to secure and cultivate a living specimen in England: “what Britain wanted,” Holway tells us, “wasn’t just a picture of Victoria regia. Nor would botanists be content with an herbarium specimen. Nothing less than the real thing would do… Procuring a live Victoria regia for Queen Victoria became a national priority.”The key site in unfolding events now moves from London to Chatsworth, as the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew were in no fit state to have the resource to cultivate the plant. Sir Joseph Banks had established a sound collection at Kew in the late eighteenth century but since his death in 1820 it had fallen into neglect and become “a slovenly and discreditable place,” as one visitor described it, far behind commercial nurseries. At Chatsworth, however, the gardens were flourishing under the Duke of Devonshire’s appointment of Joseph Paxton to the position of head gardener, and as Paxton takes center-stage we encounter perhaps the most compelling part in Holway’s account of the Victoria regia’s story.At the stately home of Chatsworth, located in the Derbyshire countryside and surrounded by over 1500 acres of pleasure grounds, the current Duke was one of the wealthy amateurs with a strong interest in horticulture, and a particular fascination with exotic plants – especially orchids, with some 240 distinct species housed in the Chatsworth collection. In 1826 the Duke appointed Joseph Paxton, then just 22 years of age, as supervisor: the young Paxton took on the role with gusto, immediately “multiply[ing] every attraction [the garden] possessed” with “a boundless enthusiasm for the beautiful and marvelous in nature, controlled by a judgment that is faultless in execution, and a taste that is as refined as it is enterprising and daring,” as the Duke later wrote. The ambitious young gardener proved to be the ideal partner, catering to the Duke’s every horticultural whim, rising to such astounding challenges as moving a 40-year old weeping ash from 28 miles away, or delivering a monkey-puzzle tree from London.Paxton’s gift wasn’t just for gardening, but also for designing the structures in which plants could be moved and housed; this makes him the protagonist of a story which becomes as much about glass-houses as about flowering plants. When seeds of the plant are finally shipped from South America, cultivation into a fully blooming flower proves challenging: the slowly reviving Kew Gardens succeed in establishing young plants, but it seems near-impossible to develop these into a blooming flower. At Chatsworth, Paxton has long been designing specialist “stoves” to house the Duke’s exotic collections. The grandest of these, as Holway details, was the Great Stove built from 1836-7, representing not just a feat of engineering but a real test of the manufacturing capabilities of the day: at 67ft in height at its peak, and 277 by 123 foot in width – almost identical in footprint to New York’s Grand Central terminal – its glass panes exceeded the size of any produced thus far, and its wood-and-iron structure required the development of a new machine capable of producing the uniform bars required.
When the Great Stove was filled with the immense tropical collection, what resulted was a scene of marvel that “transported” Darwin and was, literally, fit for a queen. In one of the most spectacular scenes in the book, Holway recounts the moment of Queen Victoria’s arrival at Chatsworth:
Illuminated at dusk by 14,000 oil lamps, the Great Stove was the first stop on a royal progress through the grounds. From afar, it looked like ‘a huge diadem of crystal.’ From the middle-distance, it was radiant, palatial. As Her Majesty and her retinue approached, the doors swung open, an orchestra struck up ‘God Save the Queen,’ and the carriages were ushered in to promenade slowly along the main avenue inside. […] Paxton was ‘a very clever man,’ the Queen later wrote in her diary, ‘quite a genius.'
It’s to Chatsworth, then, that one of the first Victoria regia plants is taken to be accommodated in Paxton’s specially designed tanks. It comes as no surprise that just 12 weeks later his labor comes to fruition and the nation finally sees what it’s been waiting for: the flower of empire itself. As Holway writes,
On that first evening, and on all first-night blooms thereafter, a faint blush became perceptible as the myriad dewy petals unfurled. As they spread open, a luscious perfume filled the air, intoxicating the spectators. Then, as the miracle continued, the petals folded inward in the early hours of the morning and remained closed until the evening, when the flowers reopened, its color deepening to a warm rose, its centre lifting in a crown of gold.
If that spectacle isn’t enough, Paxton goes a step further: realizing that the lily pads are substantial structures, he experiments with the weight that the leaves can withstand until he succeeds in placing his seven-year-old daughter atop a lily pad. The moment was famously pictured in the Illustrated London News and became something of a sensation: it was comparable, wrote one reporter, to “the inflated fancies of moon-struck travellers”, while Paxton stated that “Nothing I believe has caused so much stir in the fashionable world and also in the world of gardening”. The image of a young girl delicately balanced on a lily pad encapsulated some of the most resonant themes of the era: the duality of strength and fragility in nature, the place of humans in the natural world, the meeting-point of science and art, the cultivation of effortless perfection, and the marketability of spectacle.After the display of “first bloom” the final part in this story reads almost as a coda to the Victoria regia’s history, taking us into its cultural afterlives. At the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations of 1851 Paxton is once again a key player, his design for the Crystal Palace representing the culmination of his expertise in glass-house construction. At the time when the Exhibitions organizers were searching for a suitable design in which to house the displays, Paxton had not long completed a new hothouse for the Victoria regia which far surpassed any other in elegance and architectural significance: what’s more, it had been inspired by the structure of the water lily’s leaf, which had advanced his understanding of architectural support. It is from this glass-house that the design for the Crystal Palace grows: described by Dickens as “the great many great lily houses joined together in Hyde Park,” the symbolic link between the water lily and the Crystal Palace was forged. Here, writes Holway,
was the Great Stove all over again, except that instead of enclosing a garden of the most exquisite specimens of equatorial flora a connoisseur could wish for, the Crystal Palace would accommodate just about as many industrial goods as any nation chose to contribute, as well as the millions who traveled to London to explore this new world.
We end, then, with the triumphant raising of the Crystal Palace and the Victoria regia becomes somewhat eclipsed by this new spectacle. Its history takes on a final, appropriately Victorian twist, for the Victoria regia appears in the Crystal Palace not in its full flowering form – visitors could travel down the road to see the water lily at Kew Gardens – but instead as manufactured artifact. A replica model represented the Victoria regia at each stage of development, while a range of products capitalized on the contemporary appeal of the flower: Victoria regia brooches, tea services, and a papier-mâché cot could all be found within the Great Exhibition.
Today, Holway concludes, the
Victoria regia is still a marketable resource: tourists can journey back to the point of origin and follow in Schomburgk’s footsteps in search of the
Victoria regia on treks, or boat and helicopter rides. Yet one suspects that while the end-point of these tours might be the same marvelous flower, what the water lily meant to the Victorians far exceeded anything that can be recaptured in a journey today; for as Holway’s book suggests, “the flower of empire” created and defined a cultural moment more uniquely fascinating than the flower itself.____
Charlotte Mathieson teaches and researches English literature at the University of Warwick, and blogs about nineteenth-century literature and culture at
charlottemathieson.wordpress.com.
