Between 1760 and 1840, exotic plants were imported from across Britain's 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new book—part art history, part polemic—weaves fine art, botanical illustration, gender studies, and previously unpublished archival material into a political and ethical account of Britain’s heritage, showing how plants were not only integral to English gardens of the Georgian and Victorian eras but also to British culture more broadly. 

Drawing on Laird’s genealogical research into his own family’s colonial past, The Dominion of Flowers (Yale University Press) foregrounds Indigenous ideas about “plant relations” in a study that animates trans-oceanic movements of plants and people.  

This talk will show how, researched “virtually" in pandemic Toronto, the book’s three-part structure emerged: global, pan-European, and local. Following the talk, Therese O’Malley, a historian of landscape and garden design, will facilitate a conversation about Laird’s forty-year career as a 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. 

Mark Laird is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, and a former faculty member of Harvard University. He is the author of The Flowering of the Landscape Garden and A Natural History of English Gardening. The Dominion of Flowers completes his trilogy. In the UK, he has been a historic planting consultant to Painshill Park Trust, English Heritage and Strawberry Hill Trust, in Ontario he has worked on Rideau Hall, Parkwood, and Chiefswood. 

Therese O’Malley, Ph.D., FSAH, is a landscape and garden design historian, focusing on the 18th to 20th centuries and the transatlantic exchange of plants and ideas. Former associate dean of CASVA, National Gallery of Art (1984-2021), she continues to lecture and publish internationally. Her many publications include Keywords in American Landscape Design (2010), now expanded as the website, History of Early American Landscape Design. O’Malley has held guest professorships at Penn, Harvard, and Princeton, and serves on boards and advisory committees including those of Dumbarton Oaks, New York Botanical Garden, and the U.S. State Deptartment Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Property. She was chair of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (1994-2000) and president of the Society of Architectural Historians (2000-2006).