On Gardens
My current research project is a manuscript, provisionally titled Ornament as Idea: Thinking through the Early Modern Garden, on northern European patterned gardens as sites of knowledge production and transmission. Ornamental patterned gardens offered formal, physical structures in which to order newly arrived plant specimens from colonial settlements in the Americas whose origins, properties, and applications were little known and whose composite names conveyed limited meaning to European naturalists and gardeners. By centering my inquiry on botanic and pleasure gardens in France, England, the Low Countries, and colonial North America, I demonstrate how attempts to order the natural world from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century offer a vernacular and ornamental corpus through which to consider the ways that knowledge traveled differently in the pre-Enlightenment period.
Upcoming Presentations
Living Storage: Early Modern Greenhouses as Bioshelters
Early Modern Spaces and Practices of Storage panel at the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting, March 2025
Past Presentations
Lessons in the Jardin du Roi: Changes in Early Modern European Botany
LLoyd Library and Museum, September 2024
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, March 2024
Ordering the Ground: Ornamental Parterres and the Emergence of Academic Botany
Delivered at the Making Green Worlds panel, College Art Association annual meeting, 16 February 2023
Beyond the Salon: Nicolas Lancret’s Painted Imaginings of Pierre Crozat’s Gardens
Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture delivered at the Dallas Museum of Art, 3 November 2022
Gibbons, Naturally
Delivered at the Grinling Gibbons and the Story of Carving Conference at the V&A, 24-25 June 2022
The Order of Nature, the Disorder of Names
Delivered at the British Art and Natural Forces Conference at the Paul Mellon Centre, October 2020
Recording: https://youtu.be/SKNDZGbQeN0
Ordering the Ground
Delivered at the Premodern Studies Seminar at the Newberry Library, December 2019
Thought Patterns: Art and Nature in an Eighteenth-Century Curiosity Cabinet
Delivered at the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, April 2019
Rococo Thought Patterns
Delivered at the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute, February 2018
Header Image: Detail from John Parkinson’s Paradisi in Sole. Paradisus Terrestris (London, 1629)