PhD Research
Botanic Dreams: How Did Linnaean Botanic Taxonomy and Metaphor Reinforce Eighteenth Century Sexual Hierarchy? (working title)
In 1729 Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) published a university dissertation which affirmed that plant fertilisation occurs when pollen from the male stamen lands on the stigma of the female flower. He then used the number of the stamen in a flower to organise plants into different species, prioritising them over the stigma. In describing his novel method of plant taxonomy, he used the metaphor of the marriage bed and aligned plant reproduction with human sex.
Contemporaneously in England, elite women were largely confined to domestic and social spaces. They were excluded from university, and from almost all professional and academic organisations. They were brought up within a patriarchal hierarchy whereby a father could select his daughter’s husband, and when she married, a woman forfeited her wealth and property to her spouse and from thenceforth was accountable to him.
When Linnaeus introduced his new system of plant taxonomy, he not only reinforced social culture in his prioritisation of the male over the female, but he used a metaphor which was deemed by many as disgusting, immoral and unsuitable for female consumption.
Taking these ideas as starting points, this PhD research project uses the methodology of collage in its widest sense, to consider how elite women, largely confined to the domestic background, might have honed their pastimes, to negotiate, comment upon, or subvert the opinion which deemed the study of Linnaean botany unfeminine and inappropriate for their gender. Taking caricatures of twenty-four categories of men and women, it explores how the multiplicity of genders seen in plants, might also be seen in human terms and how forty-eight historical individuals played out their roles in the context of elite English society.
Exhibition Images: Shaw House, Newbury. February 2025
The exhibition, Botanic Dreams, was first shown at Shaw House, Newbury in February 2025. Shaw House was originally built by the Thomas Dolman who had made his fortune in the cloth industry and was anxious to establish his status as one of the landed gentry. My particular interest in the house however, results from its eighteenth century occupants, the 1st Duke and Duchess of Chandos who extended and refurbished the property including what is now known as the Chandos Room with its beautiful reproduction eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper. The Duke of Chandos bought Shaw House in 1728, adding it to the portfolio of estates he owned across the country. This rural retreat would become the family’s favourite escape from their busy public life in London and a place that was conveniently located mid-way between London and Bath, a city they frequently visited.
I have selected Cassandra Brydges, Duchess of Chandos to occupy the position of The Wife within the female orders of The GAME, see below. She was picked, not only because of the role she fulfilled as the second of Brydges’ three wives, but for her connection to the vegetable kingdom through her guardian, the botanist John Ray. As a wife and mistress of an elite and extensive household, Cassandra was part of the last generation of women whose responsibilities lay in ensuring the gardens produced sufficient food to feed the family and who had a knowledge of ‘simples’ and their use in the preparation of medicaments; tasks that became reframed and elevated to the professional occupations of horticulturist, apothecary and botanist over the course of the century. You can read Cassandra’s profile, the multiple taxonomic possibilities for her classification, together with her connections to other characters within The GAME here.
Click on an image below to enlarge
The GAME
GAME consists of the tops and bottoms of male and female figures presented as playing cards. Designed as a conversation piece on hybridity and gendered roles, they are set out on ‘male' and ‘female’ only tables and can be rearranged to form new ‘bodies’. The same images are depicted on 'seed packets', as hybrids of male and female bodies. Profile text on each of these forty-eight individuals, focussing on marriages, professional and social roles and opportunities are currently under development, if you have information to contribute or would like to be put on the mailing list when new research is released, please email me.
Click on an image below for a profile of the character
