“Her Flowers are Her Children”: Cultivating Victorian Houseplant Motherhood in Colonial Archives

Ann Garascia
Additional contact information
Ann Garascia: California State University San Bernardino, United States

Journal of Ecohumanism, 2023, vol. 2, issue 1, 21-37

Abstract: This essay introduces the figure of Victorian “plant mother” whose houseplant amities provide an alternative model of motherhood within nineteenth-century colonial archives. I argue that compiling instances of her dispersed presences across archival documents reveals a flexible avatar of motherhood who restores maternity’s embodied and emotional dimensions. Not simply an agent of colonialism, the plant mother and her plants provide moments of transformation that coax out of colonial archival structures more inclusive models of domesticity, family, and belonging. To access these moments, I build a framework for interpreting nineteenth-century archival materials that braids feminist and critical plant studies perspectives that share commitments to expanding understandings of archives in their theoretical and material forms. This essay reconstructs the lives of Victorian plant mothers from plant births to deaths. Through these archival reconstructions, I insist that Victorian houseplant mothers show us how to locate nodes of loving resistance within colonial archival structures.

Keywords: Critical plant studies; feminist studies; archives; Victorian period; horticulture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.tplondon.com/ecohumanism/article/view/2892/2086 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mig:ecohjl:v:2:y:2023:i:1:p:21-37

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://ecohumanism. ... ormation/librarians/

DOI: 10.33182/joe.v2i1.2892

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Ecohumanism is currently edited by Peggy Karpouzou and Nikoleta Zampaki

More articles in Journal of Ecohumanism from Transnational Press London, UK
Bibliographic data for series maintained by TPLondon ().