Spring is in full swing and the new exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, “In Bloom: How Plants Changed our World”, has been perfectly timed for the season, said Tim Adams in The Observer. It’s “a celebration of the ways that plants have sprouted and unfurled in our artistic and scientific imaginations”.
With a series of artworks and other items sourced largely from the collections of Oxford University – from 17th-century flower paintings to preserved plant specimens to works of contemporary art – it also provides a potted history of this country’s horticulture.
Its story begins with John Tradescant the Elder, keeper of Charles I’s gardens, who travelled the world to bring back specimens for his patrons: phlox and jasmine from Virginia, horse chestnuts from the Balkans. That “zeal for collection seeded many branches of curiosity”: artists reproduced flowers in minute detail, helping Enlightenment thinkers to identify “the precise mechanics of plant reproduction”. As this exhibition moves from Carl Linnaeus to Erasmus Darwin to contemporary painters, it is “consistently illuminating”.
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Dominating the first gallery is an “imposing” portrait of Tradescant’s son, John Tradescant the Younger, who succeeded to his role, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Depicted as a bearded gardener, he looks “every inch the Royalist horticulturalist’s crumpet”, like “a 17th-century Monty Don”. The Tradescants “embodied a new type of naturalist” who approached plant-collecting scientifically.
Among these was Mary Somerset, the Duchess of Beaufort, who showed off her plant collection at her Gloucestershire estate. She commissioned a “florilegium”, a book of flower illustrations: there’s a “dramatic, mind-bending” watercolour of a sunflower featured here, as strange as any painting by the surrealist Paul Nash.
This exhibition is full of interesting stuff – we learn that the Victorian obsession with ferns probably inspired the frond-like design of custard creams – but it struggles to tell both a scientific story and an aesthetic one. Its “overarching narrative could have done with more training and pruning”.
It’s a “rather special” show nonetheless, said Ann Treneman in The Times. I loved the paintings of tulips and roses, poppies and orchids: the still life of “broken and fraying” tulips by Simon Verelst (1644-1721) “feels so real that it almost pops out of the frame”. And a “scent trumpet” allows us to enjoy the “intoxicating” scent of the opium poppy.
The exhibition certainly tries “to cover too much ground” – and I could have done with more detail on the plants that have “changed our lives”: tea, for instance. Yet it has “oomph and originality”, presenting a “mix of the wonderful, the weird and the downright wacky”. “I would happily go back.”
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Until 16 August
