Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture) Review

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Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture) ReviewNowadays men and women take up gardening, landscaping, and natural science. But this wasn't always so. In ancient times, particularly in Rome, women grew and sold flowers. But it wasn't considered the best of jobs. It was in fact a job that gave a girl a bad reputation. She didn't just sell flowers. She also sold herself.
However, over time, growing flowers came to be considered as o.k. as growing fruit, medicinal and vegetable gardens. Monks grew them at monasteries. Nobles had them grown around their castles. So too then did wives in their respected capacities as supervisors of households. Men worked also with plants, but as part of their jobs as doctor, guild member, pharmacist. Some women worked, outside the household, with plants. But this only happened if they were the wives or widows of guild members.
However, flower gardening slipped out of women's hands for a time during the 17th and 18th centuries. How did that happen? And how did women once again become respected flower gardeners?
Men took over, because flowers became a commercial success and a political symbol, on a large scale. This might not have happened, if people had taken the advice of Olivier de Serres. De Serres wrote le theatre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs in 1600. He advised the French to grow well-known and wild flowers that needed little money, care and attention. He particularly pushed growing chamomile, daisies, hyssop, marjoram, mint, sage, thyme, and violets.
However, anyone making decisions about large-scale flower plantings chose what became known as florists' flowers. These flowers needed money, care and attention. These flowers dominatd gardening for the next two centuries, despite de Serres' good advice. These flowers were the demanding, exotic and expensive anemones, carnations, hyacinths, irises, narcissi, ranunculi, and tulips. But in France, these flowers meant money and influence for any with the CULTIVATED POWER to grow them.
French King Louis XIV's properties were known for their gardens and their flowers. Flowers were also the subjects of the carpets, embroidered seats, paintings, and tapestries he owned. Because flowers were in such demand outside the household, men took over the growing and selling of flowers.
The consequences were longlasting in many regards. Exotic flowers, such as tulips, became widely grown and known. Gardening was perfected as a science and art, with accurate and clear recordkeeping. Ancient knowledge wasn't lost. What grew naturally in France was considered less interesting and profitable than what had been grown in ancient Greece and Rome.
The flower trade brought the world together in a marketplace. What grew naturally in France was considered less interesting and profitable than what was being grown outside Europe. The flower trade helped bring about economic and political stability, after many years of bloody civil and religious wars. Flowers, such as the fleur-de-lys, united people around the central figure of the king. The noble and royal gardens also brought in admiring and important visitors, royalty, and diplomats.
But this was all part of the centralizing rule of the sun king, Louis XIV le grand. It was all part of trying to pull the different regions together so that all would recognize Paris as the capital and the king as the final power. But the next kings, Louis XV and particularly Louis XVI, couldn't keep up the pace. People might have put up with beautifully kept up and sometimes edible flowers planted on top of good crop land. They couldn't accept good crop land turned to gardens falling into disrepair. Exotics had become familiar. Flowers were no longer symbols of a clever monarch. The French revolution turned the country in a more practical direction: everyone should have beloved King Henri IV's promised chicken in every pot, grow plants that had always grown naturally in the region, and eat their own bread.
After the late 18th century, women once again took up gardening, landscaping, and natural science. In our day, there's probably not such a seesaw between men and women in those fields. There's also probably not such a seesaw between exotics and natives. Plenty of people would listen to a modern-day de Serres' advice. But also plenty of people would try for gardens balanced between native and non-native plants.Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture) Overview
Cultivated Power explores the collection, cultivation, and display of flowers in early modern France at the historical moment when flowering plants, many of which were becoming known in Europe for the first time, piqued the curiosity of European gardeners and botanists, merchants and ministers, dukes and kings. Elizabeth Hyde reveals how flowers became uniquely capable of revealing the curiosity, reason, and taste of those elite men who engaged in their cultivation.The cultural and increasingly political value of such qualities was not lost on royal panegyrists, who seized upon the new meanings of flowers in celebrating the glory of Louis XIV. Using previously unexplored archival sources, Hyde recovers the extent of floral plantations in the gardens of Versailles and the sophisticated system of nurseries created to fulfill the demands of the king's gardeners. She further examines how the successful cultivation of those flowers made it possible for Louis XIV to demonstrate that his reign was a golden era surpassing even that of antiquity.Cultivated Power expands our knowledge of flowers in European history beyond the Dutch tulip mania, and restores our understanding of the importance of flowers in the French classical garden. The book also develops a fuller perspective on the roles of gender, rank, and material goods in the age of the baroque. Using flowers to analyze the movement of culture in early modern society, Cultivated Power ultimately highlights the influence of curious florists on the taste of the king, and the extension of the cultural into the realm of the political.


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