SerpApi.Org
There’s much to savour in the Ashmolean Museum’s new exhibition about plants, which draws extensively upon Oxford University’s collections to avoid the “substantial environmental cost” of international loans, as director Xa Sturgis puts it. (I suppose a show with a botanical theme can be forgiven for flaunting its green credentials.) But, given the vagueness and breadth of the ostensible topic (“humanity’s relationship to nature”), I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what it’s really about. The overarching narrative could have done with more training and pruning.
Appealing to a local audience, In Bloom opens by focusing on a father-and-son pair of English naturalists and collectors, both called John Tradescant, whose “curiosities” (including a stuffed dodo) were part of the museum’s founding collections.
Dominating the first gallery is an imposing portrait of the bearded younger John – who, in 1638, succeeded his father as “Keeper of His Majesty’s Gardens, Vines, and Silkworms”, having travelled to Virginia to collect plants (including jasmine and columbines) likely on behalf of Charles I. In it, he appears as a gardener, one hand on a spade or fork. With his white undershirt unbuttoned almost to his navel, and a smouldering gaze, he looks every inch the Royalist horticulturalist’s crumpet: a 17th-century Monty Don.
The Tradescants embodied a new type of naturalist who approached plant-collecting scientifically during the 1600s and 1700s. In the same gallery, a grand florilegium (an illustrated flower book), commissioned by the passionate botanist Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, lies open to show a dramatic, mind-bending watercolour illustration of a sunflower. It seems to stare at the viewer like a great yellow-and-black cyclopean eye – as strange as those painted by the British Surrealist Paul Nash.
In Bloom is in part a history of botany. Exhibits include preserved specimens, an apothecary jar for ingredients including dried poppy-resin droplets, papier-mâché models of plants’ tufty reproductive parts in bell jars, and a print of the 18th-century Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus, whose classificatory system standardised the field.
But it also strives to tell an aesthetic story; hence, the presence of Iznik dishes decorated with tulips and other floral motifs, Dutch still lifes (including a tour de force by Rachel Ruysch featuring poppies with frayed petals that seem to be suffering an electric shock), a drab watercolour of a dog rose by John Ruskin, and a panel painted in 1879 by Lawrence Alma-Tadema depicting a coquettish pale-skinned brunette half-hiding behind orchids. The third and final gallery is filled exclusively with work by contemporary artists, some of it skilfully, and earnestly, executed but second-rate.
If there is a thread, it’s our fascination with nature’s marvellous weirdness. Several astonishing botanical illustrations – including that watercolour of a sunflower – exult in the outlandish, otherworldly forms of specific plants, often blown-up and rendered with crystalline precision.
Intriguing stories are alluded to throughout – such as the peculiar Victorian obsession with ferns, which may have influenced the intricate, frond-like design on custard creams. But, in the end, the blooms of interest and knowledge feel unconnected.
At the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from March 19 until Aug 16; ashmolean.org
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