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Utopian Gardens

In these lectures, Professor Jim Endersby explores the links between botanic gardens and utopias, both modern, European inventions that embodied a fascination with the future. But utopia, he argues, is not the dream of Eden, nor of a lost golden age; it represents a new idea - that humans might be able to perfect the world for themselves. These lectures will explore how these ideas were embodied in a range of real and imaginary gardens, each of which embodied ideas of a perfect world.

Jim Endersby is Visiting Gresham Professor in the History of Science. He is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Sussex and specialises in Victorian natural history and the modern genetics. (from gresham.ac.uk)

Lecture 1 Lecture 2 Lecture 3 Lecture 4

Lecture 1 - Experimental Gardens from Francis Bacon to Today
Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627) imagined a utopian island including an experimental garden, where plants could be made "greater much than their nature". These new plants were central to Bacon's dream of a better world, where hunger - and even death itself - might be conquered. Robert Sharrock's History of the improvement and propagation of vegetables (1660) attempted to apply Bacon's new learning and improve humanity's food supply. This lecture will begin with Bacon's imagined garden, then consider the long-term promise of the experimental or scientific garden, which would eventually lead to today's biotechnologies.

Lecture 2 - Gardens of Empire: The Role of Kew and Colonial Botanic Gardens
Sydney's botanic garden, founded in the early nineteenth century, was expected to ship new plants 'home' to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from where they could be transplanted to other colonial gardens, to see if they could become valuable new crops to enrich the British Empire. Such plans had varying degrees of success, leaving botanists to question why specific plants would only grow in particular places. This lecture looks at how Kew addressed such questions, and the tensions between its role in the advancement of science, and as a public park.

Lecture 3 - Making New Plants: A History
This lecture examines the work of Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist who was one of the first to claim that science would allow plants and animals to be designed to order. It also looks at the early twentieth-century 'Station for Experimental Evolution' in New York, and at the utopian vision of Charlotte Gilman Perkins' Herland (1915), a novel describing a lost world populated by women that took the form of a perfect garden, whose wonderful plants and lack of men were both explained by de Vries' theory of mutation.

Lecture 4 - Good Gardeners of Planet Earth? The Vision of Silent Running (1972)
Are humans fit to be gardeners of this planet? Today's biotechnology companies promote themselves in distinctly utopian ways, but increasing numbers of people find their claims difficult to reconcile with the daily evidence of the damage that technologies like intensive agriculture have done to this planet. This lecture explores these notions through an examination of the film Silent Running (1972), which imagined gardens in space, in which the last remnants of Earth's vegetation are preserved aboard gigantic spaceships.