Cultural and historical geographies of the arboretum

Abstract

Arboretums were innovative and important developments in British, and ultimately global, landscape gardening during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Inspired by British and European traditions of landscape gardening, horticulture, agricultural improvement and botany, they were imbued with symbolism and meaning according to the circumstances of their creation, character and usage. For some nineteenth-century landscape gardeners and horticulturists, they offered global excursions in microcosm providing rational recreation, aesthetic enjoyment and botanical experimentation. Their systematic planting promoted an image of rational, objective science and appropriate behavioural responses, helping to differentiate and shape Victorian middle-class identity. However, the complex relationships between designs, management, botanical displays, organic agencies and consumption ensured contested and contingent responses and appropriations.