Cultivating knowledge in nineteenth-century English gardens

The popularity of botany and natural history in England combined with the d emographic changes of the first half of the nineteenth century to bring abo ut a new aesthetics of gardening, fusing horticultural practice with a conn oisseurship of botanical science. Horticultural societies brought theoretic al botany into the practice of gardening. Botanical and horticultural perio dicals disseminated both science and prescriptions for practice, yoking the m to a progressive social agenda, including the betterment of the working c lass and urban planning. Finally, botany was incorporated into systems of e ducation, reinforcing the union of theory and practice. Three garden plans from the 1790s, 1835, and 1846 illustrate the embodiment of this theory and practice in the design of private suburban gardens. The se horticultural/botanical gardens, described in the second half of the art icle, represent a neglected side of botany's bifurcated descent from Renais sance collections of curiosities into horticultural gardening and herbarium -based systematics.