"A Reciprocal Exchange of the Productions of Nature": Plants and Place in France and America

abstract:This essay explores the meaning of European plants in American gardens, and of American plants in French gardens, in the context of eighteenth-century French–American botanical exchange. Such exchanges, carried out in the Revolutionary Era, reveal Americans' eagerness to use plants to bring America into the intellectually and aesthetically cosmopolitan European cultural world as well as Europeans' simultaneous use of American plants to achieve colonial power in the world and to suit an aesthetic that communicated and reinforced that power. At the nexus of fashion, scientific curiosity, and geopolitics, transatlantic plants became potent vehicles of power.