In Bloom Review – This tumultuous history of plant adventurers both disturbs and delights | Art and design

MAri Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, died in 1715 after spending her life changing the world of flowers. She purchased plants from Africa, India, China, Japan and South America that had never been seen in Britain before. These were intended for her extensive formal garden – a print featured in this delightful exhibition showing her regular roads and farms, all covering a large part of Gloucestershire. But if Somerset’s disciplined gardens are an age of pure reason, then the painting she commissioned of one of her sunflowers is a yellow ecstasy: a blazing cosmic eye staring wildly back at you.

This show reveals that science and obsession have never been so far apart in the history of humans and plants. In the 17th and 18th centuries, European botany made enormous intellectual advances, filling European gardens with new colors and scents. All of this depended on the growing commercial, naval and military power that brought the world’s seeds and bulbs to Britain and its neighbours. However, even as pioneers collected and classified the world’s plants, the sheer beauty and sensuality of the flowers threatened to turn analysis into a fantasy steeped in beauty.

This is hinted at in a photograph of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus wearing traditional Sami costume and practicing a shamanic drum. Linnaeus invented the systematic classification of plants and animals, but here he allied himself with beliefs that humans could magically communicate with nature. The image commemorates his journey to the Far North, and as with his book Flora Laponica, was his clothing a nod to the Sami help he received in identifying many subarctic flowers?

Another adventurer here is responsible for the ubiquity of rhododendrons in the British Isles: Joseph Hooker. An illustration by Hooker himself commemorates his thread-tearing expedition to the Himalayas in 1848-49 in search of this mountain flower and the seeds which he brought with him to Kew Gardens in London. By then, botany was inherently linked to faraway places. Kew was a multicultural paradise: one relief shows visitors admiring, among the planted trees, a domed mosque with two minarets, a replica of part of the Alhambra and a Chinese temple. Today, only the great pagoda remains. The Victorians later came face to face with tropical plants at the Palm House, also shown here.

There is a chance to smell burning poppy seeds next to a case containing a 19th century opium pipe. The exhibition’s subtitle – How Plants Changed Our World – really makes sense here. Gentle poppies destroy life, but beauty is also a drug. Nearby is a 17th-century painting by Dutch artist Rachel Ruesch that depicts a poppy growing around a forest tree: not the common poppy or the garden poppy but a flaming, dancing kind with long, bloody petals that burst mesmerizingly in the shaded forest where Ruesch found them.

Except she didn’t do that. The forest setting is fantastical, because the poppy variety she draws did not evolve naturally but was bred by Dutch flower breeders as a novelty. Here the story of botany moves from science to sensuality, from interest to addiction. In addition to cultivating new poppy species, the Dutch, at the height of their commercial power in the 17th century, became obsessed with tulips, which came from the Islamic world and were especially cultivated at the Ottoman court.

You can still feel the power of tulipomania in the disturbing beauty of Dutch flower paintings. Surrounded by night, the spiky white and red tulips in Ambrosius Bosschaert’s 1609 picture, “A Vase of Flowers,” look alluring. Flowers do Malideal, irreplaceable, already dead when he paints it. Here Dutch tulip paintings appear cleverly alongside Turkish ceramic plates with tulip motifs that see the flower in a more subdued sense, as part of an eternal pattern preserved forever on the plate. European flower paintings are more scientific, more precise, but also more thoughtful and romantic. Life means death. The caterpillar and snail are coming.

Underneath all this boldness there is no avoiding the gloom. We see botanical drawings and pressed flowers, and some of the petals in the albums here are 400 years old. However, even more bizarre, even grotesque in fact, are 19th-century “teaching models” of flowers made of painted wood and papier-mâché that precisely mimic every detail of orchids and other plants, life-sized, for students to learn about, well, what? These supposedly scientific models look as strange as ancient anatomical waxworks of disemboweled human bodies. There are some beautiful works of art here, but I cannot escape the idea that all art and science are powerless before the mystery and beauty of a single living daisy.