Radiating Centers: Charles Darwin, Rose La Touche, and Ruskinian Botany

Described by poet Alice Meynell as “a book of botany made lovely,” Proserpina constructs its new floral nomenclature from the growth habits and cultural history of plants.Footnote ¹¹ Over the course of several hundred pages, Ruskin renames his favorite wildflowers after classical goddesses and Shakespearean heroines in order to redefine scientific knowledge according to myth and morality. Rather than expose nature's secrets through dissection and magnification, Proserpina asks readers to cultivate compassion for plants—something that Ruskin felt professional botanists had expunged from their discipline. The book specifically targets Darwin's inquiries into plant reproductive processes, for these experiments suggested that floral beauty was but an incidental product of pollination.Footnote ¹² Eager to address the supposed shortcomings of modern science, Ruskin spent the final decades of his career composing equally unorthodox interpretations of ornithology (Love's Meinie, 1873–81) and geology (Deucalion, 1875–83). Together with Proserpina, these texts comprise a Ruskinian animal, vegetable, and mineral trilogy that prescribes, in the words of Jed Mayer, a “non-invasive form of natural history study.”Footnote ¹³

Darwin is certainly one of Proserpina's principal antagonists, described as having “never saw the difference between ugliness and beauty absolute” (25:268). However, he is not the only figure that threatened Ruskin's “non-invasive” attitude toward nature. The florists and nurserymen with whom Ruskin had waged a culture war since his youth also shaped his botanical prose. For example, one chapter of Proserpina proposes that veronica flowers cannot be “provoked to glare into any gigantic impudence at a flower show” through “the follies of the curbreeding florist” (25:439). Another section similarly chastises “garden-florists” for misinterpreting the color of wild pansies (25:409). These and other passages borrow the pejorative terms that Ruskin employed throughout his writings to pillory commercial plant breeding, such as the “monster-hunting florist” (3:159) ridiculed in Modern Painters I (1843) or the “massy horticultural-prize roses” (28:183) demonized in Fors Clavigera (1871–84). As Michael Waters notes, Ruskin was ever ready to lambaste the “seemingly improved condition” of a plant if “human interference” was its suspected author (4:170).Footnote ¹⁴ According to Ruskin's secretary William Collingwood, the critic “took far more pleasure in the wood-anemone [. . .] than in anything buyable from the nurseryman's catalogue” and avoided “potting and grafting and layering and budding.”Footnote ¹⁵

Although Proserpina celebrates the role of flowers in Western literature, it also acknowledges that human culture is not the be-all-end-all for plants. In his analysis of contemporary bio art, George Gessert underlines the book's “curbreeding” florists in order to suggest that Ruskin saw plants as “not merely raw materials or luxuries but beings at the very center of human life.”Footnote ¹⁶ This dovetails with Lars Spuybroek's reading of the famous anti-Darwinian pronouncement that opens Proserpina's fourth chapter: “The flower exists for its own sake,—not for the fruit's sake” (25:249). Spuybroek contends that this claim modifies Darwin in order to initiate a “reversal of means and ends,” in which “[t]he aim of life is to flourish, not to survive.”Footnote ¹⁷ Recently, Deanna Kreisel has shown how Ruskin's earlier writings on crystals and metals likewise formulate a “critique of the instrumental view of natural resources” by refusing “to limit the capaciousness of life.”Footnote ¹⁸ Throughout Proserpina, Ruskin stresses that the consumer goods derived from plants should not dictate how humans perceive or exploit vegetal resources. One product he singles out for continual abuse is the florist flower, which epitomizes for him the subjugation of plant vitality to human caprice and capitalist greed.

Floriculture resurfaces at multiple points in the letters that Maria La Touche contributed to Proserpina in the 1880s. Positioning herself against specimens that are “changeable by cultivation” (25:524), she reminds us that advances in commercial plant breeding were just as problematic for Ruskin as Darwinian theories about the material evolution of flowers. Maria La Touche, however, remains a peripheral figure in the field of Ruskin studies. Her accomplishments as a writer often take a back seat to the life of her daughter Rose, who became the object of Ruskin's affections in the 1860s before dying at the age of twenty-seven in 1875.Footnote ¹⁹ The floricultural issues that Maria addresses in her Proserpina letters deserve a closer look, for they elucidate Ruskin's concerns about how society treated plants in daily life—not just in laboratories or lecture halls.

Because it feminizes many of the flowers it discusses, Proserpina has inspired readings not only with regard to Ruskin's scientific convictions but also his relationships with women. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, for example, has demonstrated how this essay collection encourages women to study botany yet confirms stereotypical associations of them with the natural world.Footnote ²⁰ Scholars have also examined Ruskin's gendered desire to provide Proserpina's female readership with polite euphemisms for the more graphic terminology of conventional plant nomenclature. One chapter, for example, changes the botanical family Labiatae (today called Lamiaceae) to Vestales, after the virginal Roman hearth goddess, Vesta (25:355–56). Elizabeth Campbell attributes the moralistic tone of Proserpina to Ruskin's love for Rose La Touche, arguing that he “wanted the study of plants to be ‘innocent’ enough for girls, with Rose no doubt specifically in mind.”Footnote ²¹ Paul Sawyer calls Rose the “radiating center” of Ruskin's late-career writings, while Margot K. Louis singles out Proserpina for “its plangent undercurrent of mourning for Rose La Touche.”Footnote ²² Dinah Birch offers compelling evidence in support of such arguments. Ruskin, she suggests, composed sections of Proserpina under the assumption that only Rose, if still living, would have understood their hidden meanings.Footnote ²³ More recently, M. M. Mahood has claimed that Ruskin's feelings for Rose “were crying out for expression” when he began writing about plants in the 1860s and 1870s.Footnote ²⁴ Francis O'Gorman, meanwhile, frames his discussion of Proserpina's spiritual themes within the séances that Ruskin conducted to contact Rose after she died.Footnote ²⁵ Although these accounts offer valuable insights into the biographical significance of Ruskin's flower essays, they do not recognize how Rose's mother contributed to them.

Revisiting Maria La Touche's letters and the floricultural themes they address will shift conversations about Proserpina away from veiled references to Rose toward the larger questions this book poses about plants in Victorian culture. “[M]y advice to you,” writes Ruskin in an early chapter, “[. . .] is to rest content with the general fact that leaves are green when they do not grow in or near smoky towns; and not by any means to rest content with the fact that very soon there will not be a green leaf in England, but only greenish-black ones” (25:232). Prefiguring contemporary notions of the Anthropocene, Proserpina holds human activity accountable for the destruction of natural environments.Footnote ²⁶ Ruskin asks readers to take ownership of their impact on the world and to “look upon the grass and forests of the earth as a kind of green hoar-frost, frozen upon it from our breath, as, on the window-panes, the white arborescence of ice” (25:234). By reminding people of the intimate bonds they forge with plants through shared air, Proserpina confronts the environmental costs of living in an industrial age.Footnote ²⁷ As Frost points out, the book's introductory chapter on moss offers “a nascent ecological reading” and “bioethical understanding” of nature that locates humans and nonhumans within systems of “environmental multiplicity.”Footnote ²⁸ This is a refreshing alternative to more familiar analyses that concentrate on Rose or Darwin. However, I think that Ruskin's concern for vegetal well-being extends beyond the scope of a single essay to occupy Proserpina's “radiating center.”

When Ruskin argues that a flower exists for its own sake, he invites both nineteenth- and twenty-first-century audiences to, in Marder's words, “take into account vegetal life as life, aside from the external ends it might be called to serve.”Footnote ²⁹ Proserpina's most thought-provoking and timely legacy is its message about respecting vegetal vitality—a message that Ruskin and Maria La Touche telegraph through floricultural tropes and personal observations.

Peonies and Rafters: Proserpina's Vegetal Commodities

Renowned for her wit and creativity, the Irish noblewoman Maria La Touche (whom I shall henceforth refer to simply as La Touche) met Ruskin in 1858 after engaging him as a drawing instructor for her children. Sharing an intense love of nature and art, the two developed an immediate bond and began exchanging letters that Ruskin's biographer Edward Cook claimed “were among those which he valued most” (35:lxxv). “What a wonderful creature that friend of yours seems,” Ruskin exclaimed in 1859 to the Marchioness of Waterford, an acquaintance of La Touche's; “how quick—yet how quiet. I found I could not venture to say a word carelessly before her—she saw so quickly where it was careless.”Footnote ³⁰ La Touche's keen powers of perception earned her among friends the nickname “Lacerta,” which, according to Ruskin, signified “that she had the grace and wisdom of the serpent, without its poison” (35:529).Footnote ³¹ Over time, however, this reptilian pet name proved double-edged. Ruskin's forty-odd-year friendship with La Touche was volatile, and his esteem for her temporarily vanished after she opposed his 1866 marriage proposal to Rose. While religious differences likely informed La Touche's reservations, Ruskin assumed petty jealousy was to blame. A few months after the proposal, he declared that Lacerta had become “the very ashes of what she used to be to me.”Footnote ³² Feelings remained tense until Rose's death in 1875, with reconciliation arriving the following year after Ruskin received what he interpreted as otherworldly signs from Rose to forgive La Touche.Footnote ³³ Regardless of how heartfelt this initial rapprochement was, it marks the beginning of an underexplored coda to Ruskin and La Touche's friendship, in which Proserpina plays a pivotal role.

Tim Hilton is one of the few scholars to have acknowledged that Ruskin entertained the idea of collaborating with La Touche on Proserpina, though Hilton writes that “Nothing came of this scheme.”Footnote ³⁴ On the contrary, Ruskin incorporated four excerpts from La Touche's letters to him into Proserpina. These passages range from a single paragraph to several pages in length, and they appear in the chapters “Monacha” (25:481), “Salvia Silvarum” (25:523–25), and “Of Caprice in Flowers” (25:528).Footnote ³⁵ While it is unclear when La Touche agreed to assist Ruskin with Proserpina, she was evidently intrigued by the book's first installments. “You know the wild red poppy is ‘silk and flame,’ the Professor says so,” she wrote in 1878 to Ruskin's cousin, paraphrasing a line from his essay “The Flower.”Footnote ³⁶ Given her independent success as an author and her practical knowledge of plants, La Touche had plenty to offer to the Proserpina project. In addition to having already published two novels, The Clintons (1853) and Lady Willoughby (1855), she shared with Ruskin a penchant for naturalistic gardening.Footnote ³⁷ La Touche read books by prominent Victorian horticulturalists, such as William Robinson, and oversaw the landscaping activities on her estate at Harristown in County Kildare, Ireland.Footnote ³⁸ Ruskin would later write in his autobiography Praeterita (1885–89) that “In botanical knowledge, and perception of plant-character, my eldest Irish pupil, mamma [i.e., La Touche], was miles and miles my superior” (35:527). He began seriously discussing Proserpina with La Touche in the early 1880s, around the time she started visiting his Lake District home of Brantwood.Footnote ³⁹ “[T]here is no one who can help me as you can, for you see with my eyes and more” (37:453, emphasis original), Ruskin told her in June 1883, adding a few weeks later that he wanted “to get some more Proserpina done” and hoped to see her soon.Footnote ⁴⁰ Because La Touche was Rose's mother, Ruskin may have wanted to cite her in his essays in order to endow his mythological botany with a symbolic Demeter figure. That being said, the content of La Touche's letters indicates that Ruskin's decision was both personally meaningful and rhetorically motivated.

La Touche spent July 1883 at Brantwood and wrote her first note for Proserpina the following month. “Can you tell me, to begin botanical help,” Ruskin inquired in August of that year, “why the pedicularis has such big roots, compared with the other Draconidae? [. . .] Recollect my new name for the common pedicularis Monacha Rosea[.]”Footnote ⁴¹ La Touche's reply eventually found its way into “Monacha,” a chapter of Proserpina that examines the appearance and behavior of pedicularis lousewort.Footnote ⁴² In her response, La Touche explains that certain flower roots naturally grow larger than others, while some increase their size by feeding off adjacent plants. “I find that the Monacha Rosea (Red Rattle is its name, besides the ugly one) is a perennial,” she writes, “[. . .] and the size of the roots is generally proportioned to the life of plants; except when artificial cultivation develops the root specially. [. . .] Several of the Draconidæ are parasites, and suck the roots of other plants. [. . .] The Yellow Rattle is one; it clings to the roots of the grasses and clovers. [. . .] My authority for this last fact is Grant Allen[.]” La Touche then adds brief remarks about a local Irish flower show: “We had what we choose to call the Dorcas flower show yesterday, and we gave, as usual, prizes for wild flower bouquets. I tried to find out the local names of several flowers, but they all seemed to be called ‘I don't know, ma'am’” (25:481). La Touche's “Monacha” letter speaks to both her familiarity with Ruskin's fanciful floral nomenclature and her sympathy for his thoughts on flower breeding. Besides mentioning how “artificial cultivation” impacts the inherent structure of plants, she insinuates that floriculture—of which flower shows were an important facet—does not foster the kind of botanical knowledge she most values.

La Touche's letter is also noteworthy for its appreciative reference to the popular science writer and evolutionist, Grant Allen. Allen was a vocal critic of Ruskin's spiritually informed aesthetic theories, for he believed that the discovery of natural and sexual selection had rendered such outlooks obsolete.Footnote ⁴³ In “Monacha,” La Touche paraphrases a section of Allen's essay collection Colin Clout's Calendar (1883), which describes Yellow Rattle as an “importunate parasite” that “makes a wretched living by fastening on the roots of grasses and draining them dry with its horrid clinging suckers.”Footnote ⁴⁴ La Touche spoke favorably of this book in at least one other letter to Ruskin, which may explain his willingness to retain her Allen note in Proserpina.Footnote ⁴⁵ In any case, it is worth pointing out that despite their disparate opinions over Darwin, Allen and Ruskin held kindred views on flower breeding. In one chapter of Colin Clout's Calendar, for example, Allen discloses his personal preference “for natural old-fashioned flowers, undistorted by the florist's art; instead of those stiff, overgrown, unsymmetrical bosses of irregular leaves which nursery-gardeners nowadays display with so much pride to admiring connoisseurs[.]”Footnote ⁴⁶ While the Darwinian overtones of Colin Clout's Calendar would certainly have nettled Ruskin, the book, in some respects, validates his own negative outlook on florist flowers.

La Touche returns to floriculture on several occasions in her Proserpina letters; however, her daughter has long upstaged these contributions. The section of Proserpina most frequently connected to Rose La Touche is a note on hawthorn trees from volume 1, chapter 8: “The Stem.” Because Ruskin dates this passage to the day of his beloved's death (25 May 1875), scholars often interpret it as an allusion to the mysterious illness that ended Rose's life.Footnote ⁴⁷ Taking a bough of hawthorn into hand, Ruskin describes its flowers as follows: “White,—yes, in a high degree; and pure, totally; but not at all dazzling in the white, nor pure in an insultingly rivalless manner, as snow would be. [. . .] For every little rose of it has a green darkness in the centre—not even a pretty green, but a faded, yellowish, glutinous, unaccomplished green” (25:301). On its surface, this passage ostensibly rails against the diseased “darkness” that stole Ruskin's “little rose” away from him. Yet the note returns to one of Proserpina's other topics of concern by immediately launching a barb against Darwinian botany. “Undeveloped, thinks Mr. Darwin,” Ruskin quips of the green and white hawthorn petals, “—the poor shortcoming, ill-blanched thorn blossom—going to be a Rose, some day soon; and, what next?—who knows?—perhaps a Pæony” (25:301). The idea of a tiny hawthorn floret somehow transforming into a peony or rose parodies the slow structural changes wrought by evolution that Darwin had discovered. At the same time, Ruskin's insult brings to mind Darwin's own observations about the effects of artificial cultivation on flowering trees. For example, in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), Darwin explains “that the chief reason why the hawthorn has yielded more varieties than most other trees, is that curious nurserymen select any remarkable variety out of the immense beds of seedlings which are annually raised for making hedges.”Footnote ⁴⁸ One encounters similar remarks about a variety of plants in the Victorian horticultural press, where florists of the period advertised the new specimens that they had developed through artificial breeding. In 1888, for instance, a contributor to The Tuberous Begonia claimed that “the most skilful growers of Begonias” possessed “blooms vying with those of the Rose [. . .] in size, colour and beauty.” This writer further mused that “in the course of another year or so we may expect to see blooms the size of a Pæony.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In Proserpina, the figures of Darwin and Rose hang in a tangled web of floricultural imagery. Be it florist “follies” or “specially” developed roots, Ruskin weaves a running commentary about the consumption of ornamental plants throughout his scientific criticism and private asides. The economic stakes of plant cultivation reappear at the end of “The Stem” when Ruskin defines a tree trunk as “the part of the tree out of which log and rafter can be cut.” Trees, he continues, are typically discussed according to the monetary value of their wood, such that “it would appear to be the chief end of their being to produce this part of their body.” Ruskin subsequently suggests that “in thinking of vegetable life without reference to its use to men or animals, we should rightly say that the essence of it was in leaf and flower—not in trunk or fruit” (25:310). In both structure and sentiment, this passage recalls Proserpina's oft-quoted denunciation of natural and sexual selection: “The flower exists for its own sake,—not for the fruit's sake. [. . .] The use of cherries is to produce cherry blossom; just as the use of bulbs is to produce hyacinths,—not of hyacinths to produce bulbs” (25:249–50). Instead of focusing on the building materials, foodstuffs, or decorative items that come from plants, Ruskin invites readers to recognize vegetal existence, or essence, on its own terms.

As previously noted, Ruskin's flower vs. fruit argument undercuts Darwin's contention that the purpose of beautiful blossoms is to attract pollinators. Darwin maintained that cross-fertilization generates viable plant offspring and, in the process, shapes the structure of flowers according to the preferences of visiting insects. While I agree that Ruskin bristled at this theory because it emphasized material force over spiritual and aesthetic values, I think he also discerned unsettling parallels between the selective agency of pollinators and the selective practices of flower breeders. Flies and bees altered flower petals while satiating their nutritional needs; florists did so to gratify consumer demands. “Modern florists,” marveled John Mollison in 1877, “have brought into repute hosts of varieties of flowers and plants which our forefathers never even dreamed of.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Ruskin had no desire to celebrate these professionals, “who try to make pansies round, instead of pentagonal” (25:394). By criticizing flower breeders alongside “men of science” (25:202, 223–24, 314), Proserpina enters the fray of two distinct yet interrelated conversations about floral beauty.

As a fashionable commodity manufactured through artificial crosses, the florist flower grafted Ruskin's ethical reservations with Darwinian botany onto his socioeconomic misgivings toward capitalism. Howard Hull points out that many Victorians associated Darwin's theories of natural and sexual selection “with the competitive pursuit of material wealth.”Footnote ⁵¹ Mayer, meanwhile, insists that the validity and morality of evolution were less disconcerting to Ruskin than the “highly capitalistic” mind-set the concept perpetuated and the “immoral attitudes toward the nonhuman world” it sanctioned.Footnote ⁵² Echoes of Unto This Last (1860) and Ruskin's other anticapitalist writings reverberate throughout Proserpina, as when one chapter, “The Parable of Jotham” (25:291–99), crafts an elaborate rebuke of classical economist Adam Smith. Thanks to a rich body of scholarship, we know that Ruskin loathed the mass production of cheap goods because it devalued both human labor and human life.Footnote ⁵³ He was additionally wary, notes Keith Hanley, of how “mechanised industry” had normalized the production of disposable “rubbish” at nature's expense.Footnote ⁵⁴ Allen MacDuffie adds that Ruskin wanted consumers to “shun cheap, wasteful pleasures” and to become more mindful of the connection between commodities and the environment.Footnote ⁵⁵ Like other modern industries, Victorian floriculture trafficked in this commercial world of expendable goods, producing what Deidre Shauna Lynch has called “artifact[s] of human fancy and fetishism.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Laura Anne Kalba has shown in her analysis of nineteenth-century European flower breeding that florist flowers and other cultivars were “designed for immediate and renewed consumption.” Ornamental plants, Kalba argues, were “defined by the imperatives of commodity capitalism, most notably the perpetual quest for novelty.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Waters ascribes Ruskin's hostility toward the “pursuit of floricultural novelties” to an attendant belief in “cultural degeneration under the conditions of industrial capitalism.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In Proserpina, concerns about economic and environmental harm inflect the representation of both flower breeding and modern science. Returning to some of the less famous passages of the book, such as the letters of La Touche, will further illuminate this recurrent yoking of the professional florist with the Darwinian botanist.

“Garden Evolution”: Victorian Florists and Darwinian Scientists

Volume 2 of Proserpina opens with “Viola,” an essay on violets and pansies first published in 1882. Though he does not mention Darwin by name, Ruskin speaks at length in this chapter about a “recent phrenzy for the investigation of digestive and reproductive operations in plants.” Indulging in a familiar refrain, he condemns this trend for having led scientists to devise “disgusting reasons [. . .] for every possible spur, spike, jag, sting, rent, blotch, flaw, freckle, filth, or venom, which can be detected in the construction, or distilled from the dissolution, of vegetable organism” (25:390–91). On its surface, such vitriol reads as one of Proserpina's characteristic takedowns of sexual selection.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, the “dissolution” of “vegetable organism” conjures visions not only of the Darwinian scientist tearing plants to shreds but also the commercial florist propagating novel blooms through cuttings, grafts, and crosses. The Floral World and Garden Guide, for instance, observed in 1865 that pelargoniums had been “subjected” to all kinds of “skilful hybridizing,” resulting in flowers “almost infinitely various in colours, forms, and habits.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Twenty years later the Illustrated London News declared that “Art and cultivation accomplish such wonders that perhaps some day we shall have a thornless gorse, specially grown for bouquets!”Footnote ⁶¹ During the Victorian period, “reproductive operations” were just as important to plant breeders as they were to botanists, both of whom had serious interests in the development of floral blotches and spurs.

After censuring the “recent phrenzy” over plant reproduction, Ruskin counters that his botanical system will treat flowers as living beings and study them in situ according to “what kind of places they all most fondly live, and most deeply glow” (25:391). In this respect, Proserpina foregrounds, to quote Patricia Ball, “the context of each natural object as well as [. . .] its personal qualities.”Footnote ⁶² Ruskin had previously explored the dynamic exchanges between specific organisms and larger ecosystems in his prose works of the 1840s through the 1860s,Footnote ⁶³ and “Viola” continues these investigations. In this essay, Ruskin analyzes the tonal nuances of violet petals in order to argue that a person “cannot know what violet colour really is, unless he watch the flower in its early growth. It becomes dim in age, and dark when it is gathered [. . .] a young violet glows like painted glass” (25:392–93, emphasis original). Here, Ruskin proposes that plants fulfill their aesthetic potential when humans avoid interfering with or removing them from nature. He then illustrates this concept with an incident from his life at Brantwood: “I found the children here, only the other day, munching a confection of candied violet leaves. What pleasure the flower can still give us, uncandied, and unbound, but in its own place and life” (25:392). By asking readers to take delight in plants without devouring them, Proserpina sets the consumer of floral products at its ethical core. David Craig asserts that for Ruskin, all acts of consumption carried with them a responsibility toward consumable goods, labor, and raw materials. This “ethics of consumption” further maintained that “novelties deaden the senses to the ‘delights’ of natural beauty.”Footnote ⁶⁴ By defining good consumption in Proserpina according to the ways that plants “fondly live” and “glow,” Ruskin implicitly discredits the artificial conditions under which flowers could be grown in Victorian Britain.

Long before Ruskin launched his career as an art and social critic, British florists and nurserymen had turned the selective cultivation of ornamental plants into a lucrative trade. Throughout the nineteenth century, florist flowers found their way into the large network of nurseries and greenhouses scattered across the London landscape. Major players in this field included Conrad Loddiges & Sons of Hackney, the Victoria and Paradise Nurseries in Holloway, and James Veitch in Chelsea. Dulwich, Clapton, Hammersmith, and Fulham also boasted nurseries of high repute. Expanding railways kept these establishments stocked year-round with a steady supply of blossoms and greenery, which the stalls of Covent Garden Market carried as well. Along with annuals and bulbs for outdoor flower beds, nurseries offered customers a wide selection of indoor plants.Footnote ⁶⁵ As a contributor to New Quarterly Magazine observed in 1875, the year Ruskin released Proserpina's first installment, the “greenhouse full of Geraniums, Calceolarias, Cinerarias, Lobelias, Heliotropes, Fuchsias, and Verbenas of various shades of colour” had eclipsed the “old English flowers” in vogue forty years earlier.Footnote ⁶⁶

While the origins of ornamental plant breeding date back to ancient times, British flower shows of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed markedly to the popularity of selectively cultivated blooms. To be competitive at these shows, not to mention the urban marketplace, breeders had to continually develop new variations in the colors, shapes, and sizes of their plants. Two of the oldest and most common methods of flower breeding were mass selection (the preservation of choice seeds from one generation to the next) and vegetative propagation (reproduction through cutting and grafting). New flowers could also be developed through hybridization, or the crossing of two plants that possessed some form of distinction between them.Footnote ⁶⁷ At the age of nineteen, Ruskin attacked the blossoms developed through these processes in his essay “The British Villa” (1838), which he published in horticulturalist John Claudius Loudon's Architectural Magazine (1834–39). “A flower-garden,” begins the young Ruskin, “is an ugly thing, even when best managed: it is an assembly of unfortunate beings, pampered and bloated above their natural size, stewed and heated into diseased growth; corrupted by evil communication into speckled and inharmonious colours; torn from the soil which they loved” (1:156). Ruskin concludes that a “florist may delight in this: the true lover of flowers never will,” for only someone wicked would want to tamper with the innate beauty of a plant (1:156–57).

La Touche addresses the ongoing rage for “speckled” ornamentals in one of two letters that she contributed to Proserpina's chapter “Salvia Silvarum.” Similar to “The British Villa,” this essay derides the artifice of modern flower breeding. According to La Touche, “There is a rather excessive tendency to colour in the sage family;—those Coleus things in our greenhouses with painted leaves are sages, I think. [. . .] Coleus is quite an artificial greenhouse person, as far as I know it, splendidly coloured as to its leaves, the varieties endless and indistinct” (25:524). Victorian horticulturalists bred and marketed coleus as a decorative houseplant, and its brightly patterned foliage earned it a distinguished place in works such as Shirley Hibberd's New and Rare Beautiful-Leaved Plants (1870).Footnote ⁶⁸ By referring to coleus as “painted” and “artificial,” La Touche implies that selective cultivation has reduced the plant to a lifeless object—a coleus thing, as she calls it.

Given Ruskin's disdain for ornamental plant breeding, one can understand why he included La Touche's mordant observations on the topic in “Salvia Silvarum.” In the paragraph preceding her thoughts on coleus, she casts additional aspersions onto floriculture as a professional industry: “There are a great many different salvias, but I don't think there are any of mixed or uncertain colours (I mean garden salvias), and therefore I don't think they are changed or changeable by cultivation. If they were, they would long ago have appeared in seedsmen's lists as ‘Florists’ Flowers’: there would be new varieties every year, with such sweet flower-like names as John Hopper, Thomas Granger, and Pilrig Park (a rose, and two pansies)” (25:524). All three of these blooms are floral hybrids. Thomas Granger refers to a variety of fancy pansies, while Pilrig Park, another pansy cross, draws its name from a nursery in Edinburgh.Footnote ⁶⁹ The “sweet flower-like” John Hopper, meanwhile, is a rose hybrid that breeders developed in the 1860s.Footnote ⁷⁰

La Touche had previously showcased her knowledge of cultivation in her 1855 novel Lady Willoughby—a text that both refers to Ruskin by name and paraphrases a passage of Modern Painters about botanical motifs in Italian art.Footnote ⁷¹ In one chapter of Lady Willoughby, a character stumbles into a conservatory “full of flowers, called into premature life” by a gardener, whose “mania for green-house plants and forced flowers” takes the form of “hyacinths, narcissi, and large white lilies.”Footnote ⁷² La Touche's “Salvia Silvarum” letter extends these observations into the milieu of commercial flower breeding through its litany of seedsmen. By supplying potential names for Ruskin's “curbreeding florist,” La Touche substantiates his cynical views on floriculture.

The malleability of ornamental plants to which La Touche refers in “Salvia Silvarum” was a frequent topic of discussion in the Victorian horticultural press. As Hibberd observed in 1855, “Many plants have been crossed and recrossed till it is almost impossible to distinguish or identify them.”Footnote ⁷³ Thirty years later, the Journal of Horticulture stated that “Primulas, Cinerarias, and Roses are as much florists’ flowers as Auriculas, Carnations, and Pinks are, because the origin of the varieties is due to the art of the florist.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Darwin wrote similarly of floriculture in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. In one chapter, for example, he suggests that any person “who will habitually examine highly-cultivated flowers in gardens and greenhouses will observe numerous deviations in structure [. . .] showing how plastic the organisation becomes under high cultivation.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Darwin also uses horticultural plant breeding as an analogy for natural selection in On the Origin of Species (1859), in which he notes “an astonishing improvement in many florists’ flowers, when the flowers of the present day are compared with drawings made only twenty or thirty years ago.”Footnote ⁷⁶ A reporter for The Garden expressed a comparable opinion while reviewing the Edinburgh Pansy Show in 1884, explaining that the “possibilities of culture were strikingly shown by comparing a few coloured prints of ‘named Pansies fifty years ago’ [. . .] with Pansies in 1884.” The reporter concludes from this comparison that the “gardener's art [. . .] may perhaps be called the work of ‘garden evolution.’”Footnote ⁷⁷

Such conflations of floriculture with evolution imply that the activities of a flower breeder are just as natural and instinctual as those of an insect pollinator. Ruskin, by contrast, viewed the “gardener's art” as nature's antithesis. Convinced that artificial breeding corrupted the forces of vegetal growth, he instructed readers of Proserpina to fill their gardens “only with common flowers [. . .] leaving those which needed care for their transplanted life to be found in their native places” (25:451). This statement reaffirms his earlier decree from “The British Villa” that “dahlias, tulips, ranunculi, and, in general, what are called florist's flowers, should be avoided like garlic” (1:157).

Ruskin teases out additional parallels between flower breeding and Darwinian botany in “Viola,” the chapter of Proserpina that contains one of his most gendered statements about evolution. In this essay, he cautions his “girl-readers” to ignore how “flowers invite, or require, flies to interfere in their family affairs” (25:413–14). On one hand, this warning gestures toward Ruskin's moral anxiety about flower sex organs and reproductive processes. On the other, it corroborates an earlier passage of “Viola” that describes the wild heartsease pansy as “one of the most lovely things that Heaven has made, and only degraded and distorted by any human interference; the swollen varieties of it produced by cultivation being all gross in outline and coarse in colour by comparison” (25:407). In this instance, “interference” refers to the agency of human plant breeders, rather than flies. According to Victorian garden writer George Glenny, heartsease belonged to a class of “wild-flowers that have been improved” through selective breeding. Glenny dismissed the plant itself as “a most insignificant weed” but commended it for giving “rise to one of the most esteemed races of florists’ flowers.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Darwin, too, chronicled the metamorphosis of wild pansies from “small, dull, elongated, irregular flowers” into “the beautiful, flat, symmetrical, circular, velvet-like flowers [. . .] magnificently and variously coloured, which are exhibited at our shows.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In “Viola,” Ruskin establishes a conceptual link between modern flower breeding and modern science by shifting focus from human interference to insect interference over the course of the chapter.

Darwin's personal connections to the nursery industry also may have prompted Ruskin to couple florist flowers with evolution in Proserpina. As Devin Griffiths and Jim Endersby note, Darwin was indebted to the generosity of several professional nurserymen who had gifted him orchids and other costly flowers to use in his experiments.Footnote ⁸⁰ The most prominent of these individuals was James Veitch Jr., out of whose nursery the first human-engineered orchid hybrids had emerged in the 1850s. Lynn Voskuil has identified the advent of orchid hybrids as a turning point in Victorian horticulture, for it marked a moment when the human breeder assumed the role of insect pollinator and became “even more intimately involved in the orchid's life cycle.”Footnote ⁸¹ Flower enthusiast T. C. March declared in 1862 that Veitch possessed “a reputation surpassed by none for rare exotic plants,” in part because his nursery had “introduced many valuable and varied novelties.”Footnote ⁸² That same year, Darwin reported in On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects (1862) that “Mr. James Veitch, jun. has generously given me many beautiful Orchids, some of which were of especial service.”Footnote ⁸³ Ruskin cites Orchids twice in Proserpina (25:224, 546), and his familiarity with the book may have fixed a picture in his mind of its author as a proponent of commercial floriculture.Footnote ⁸⁴

In the end, floricultural motifs mobilize Proserpina's overarching argument against wanton interference in the vegetal world. Through the intellectual discrepancies he raises with Darwin, Ruskin begs readers to separate human priorities of profit and production from the biorhythms of plants. This, in turn, challenges an instrumental outlook on nonhuman life.

Floral Caprice: Vegetal Vitality for Its Own Sake

Over the course of Proserpina, the florist flower crystallizes into an emblem of indifference toward vegetal vitality. By the time Ruskin released the final installments of this book in the mid-1880s, he had watched professional floriculture grow with unabated vigor in his home country. Nineteenth Century reported in 1885 that Covent Garden Market was “furnished with an apparently inexhaustible supply of flowers, brought up during the night in vans from nurseries,” which carried out “a purely wholesale business, their gates being closed to the public as jealously as the doors of a cotton mill or iron foundry.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This mental image of plants being manufactured on the cheap like textiles or ironwork cuts to the heart of Ruskin's hatred of commercial floriculture. From his perspective, the beauty and energy of flowers disappeared once enterprising individuals processed them down into tawdry ornaments.

In recent years, plants have figured prominently in critical analyses of how humankind relates to both the environment and the nonhuman. As Jeffrey Nealon observes, many philosophical traditions treat vegetal beings as ambiguous expressions of life that fall somewhere between the poles of living creature and inanimate matter.Footnote ⁸⁶ Marder explains that because Western culture often depicts plants as lacking the “higher capacities” of life, vegetal organisms tend to be judged “from the external standpoint of those who will impose their ends” upon them.Footnote ⁸⁷ Luce Irigaray likewise points out in her reflections on plants and subjectivity that humans gravitate toward “wondering about what we could do with the fruit or the wood of a tree,” instead of appreciating “its singularity.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In Proserpina, Ruskin arrives at comparable conclusions about “thinking of vegetable life without reference to its use to men.” One of the book's final chapters, “Of Caprice in Flowers,” visualizes vegetal vitality in concrete terms in order to undermine the perception of plants as lifeless entities. According to Monica Gagliano, to “see” a plant as truly alive is to recognize “that plants, like all living organisms, are very sensitive and active, monitoring and integrating many parameters from their environment.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Marder adds that “plants, like all living beings, articulate themselves spatially; in a body language free from gestures.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Ruskin, again with the help of La Touche, attends patiently to this vegetal language in order to convince the readers of Proserpina that plants are more than just instruments of human desire.

“Of Caprice in Flowers” did not appear in the original publication run of Proserpina, but it contains some of Ruskin's most thought-provoking arguments about human-plant relationships.Footnote ⁹¹ Throughout the book, “caprice” functions as a catchall term for a broad spectrum of vegetal faculties, including movement, growth, and mimicry. Referring to plant behavior as opposed to plant appearances, caprice also encompasses “the measure in which they [i.e., plants] grow, and are not grown; in which they spring by their own force out of the ground, and are not pulled out of it by the external force of the air” (25:526). Raymond Fitch traces Ruskin's appreciation for the “internal purposiveness and life struggle” of plants back to Modern Painters, while Frost claims that Ruskin forged solicitous ties with the nonhuman world by studying its “dynamic laws of formational growth.”Footnote ⁹² “Of Caprice in Flowers” augments Ruskin's earlier writings on these themes by pitting the discernible energy of plants against their alleged passivity. Take, for instance, the chapter's opening comparison between cultivated garden flowers and wild polypody ferns. The polypody, Ruskin writes, “enjoys itself extremely on the top of my garden wall, but would not be the least obliged to me for putting it into a flower border. The veronicas and snapdragons are partly of the same mind, and I believe my gardener, albeit wise, does not quite know how greatly he might gratify some of his pinks by letting them droop out of a cleft of crag, instead of fattening and propping them in garden luxury” (25:527).

Ruskin next turns his attention to the behavior of Oxalis acetosella, the alpine blossom that he credited for first sparking his interest in botany.Footnote ⁹³ He writes that oxalis, or common wood sorrel, exhibits “the most curious, though the most subtle, personal character in overgrowth [. . .] in having an especial liking for holes” (25:527, emphasis original). Similar to the polypody's preference for garden walls over garden plots, the oxalis exercises volition and agency within a particular environmental setting. In her fourth and final Proserpina letter, La Touche offers additional insights into this small wildflower, a variety of which grew near her home in Ireland: “About wood-sorrel. There is so very little of it here, that it does not choose to hide itself. [. . .] Don't you think plants have local customs and fashions like people? English wood-sorrel may value comfort and shelter, and the Irish sort may value conspicuousness” (25:528). La Touche's description, like Ruskin's own, is anthropomorphic. However, the claims that both writers make about respecting the “character” and “customs” of oxalis are not wholly anthropocentric. As Jane Bennett has shown, anthropomorphism does not exclusively entail the subordination of the nonhuman to the human but can, in fact, reveal “confederations” between the two.Footnote ⁹⁴ In Proserpina, Ruskin and La Touche use the anthropomorphic concept of caprice to criticize the human capriciousness that only values plants for the wooden rafters, candied violets, and hothouse bouquets they yield.

Beneath its scientific and personal imperatives, Proserpina advances a cogent argument against the excessive transformation of living plants into commodities. In a passage that captures the emotional tenor of the entire book, Ruskin reflects on society's collective “loss of the wish to gather a flower in travelling” amidst “the fury and vulgarity of modern life” (25:451). Proserpina may indulge in its poignant moments, but it ultimately reads more like a call to arms than an elegy for paradise lost. From start to finish, this collection of essays questions Victorian consumer practices by insisting that flowers—“uncandied, and unbound”—are vibrant, expressive organisms.

Enriched by the insights of Maria La Touche, Proserpina urges readers to meet vegetal life on its own terms, not those of the florist. While Darwin and Rose will doubtless remain perennial topics of interest when it comes to Ruskin and plants, their impact on his late botanical prose must be considered alongside his thoughts on commercial flower breeding. Ruskin viewed florist flowers as products of widespread indifference toward vegetal life, and many of his late writings adumbrate present-day concerns about plant blindness, or “the inability to see or notice the plants in one's environment.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Ruskin's approach to vegetal ethics merits further inquiry, and Proserpina should participate in these future conversations. Just as Asa Gray's hypothetical art student had something to learn from a careful reading of Ruskin's botany, so do consumers of today who still must weigh the consequences and conveniences of commodities against one another. Proserpina's analysis of commercial floriculture and, by extension, habits of consumption continues to court scrutiny of how we take advantage of plants in our everyday lives.