Daniels Faculty's Winter Program: The Dominion of Flowers Book Launch

As part of the Winter 2025 Daniels Faculty Public Program collection, get your tickets to this lecture and discussion, followed by a book signing, for The Dominion of Flowers, a provocative new book exploring how a wave of exotic botanical imports from across Britain’s empire shaped its gardens and psyche.

Between 1760 and 1840, plants were imported into Britain via empire and depicted in periodicals and scientific treatises as specimens alongside objects of natural history. Mark Laird’s provocative new book – part art history, part polemic – weaves fine art, botanical illustration, gender studies, and rare archival material into a political and ethical account of Britain’s horticultural heritage. Drawing on Professor Laird’s genealogical research into his family’s colonial past, The Dominion of Flowers foregrounds Indigenous ideas about ‘plant relations’ in a study that animates trans-oceanic movements of plants and people.

The talk will show how, researched ‘virtually’ in pandemic Toronto, the book’s three-part structure emerged: global, pan-European, and local. His epilogue links New Zealand to Canada, past and present. Following the talk, Therese O’Malley, a historian of landscape and garden design, will facilitate a conversation about Laird’s 40-year career as scholar and practitioner. Prompted by one reviewer who claimed ‘Laird pioneered plant humanities avant la lettre’, the conversation will turn to botanical studies within the humanities.

The Dominion of Flowers: Botanical Art & Global Plant Relations, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London, October 29 2024.