Dr Edwin Rose runs an Exhibition at Kew: Botanical Revolutions 1776-1848

Based in the Library and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, this exhibition (1 April-19 June 2025) explores one of the most important epochs in the history of botany—the Age of Revolutions.

By the late eighteenth century, the Linnaean system of classification, that being the hierarchic division of nature into classes, orders, genera and species, the last two categories of which formed a Linnaean binomial name, dominated natural history in Britain. Kew was no exception, with elite naturalists such as Joseph Banks (1776–1820) influencing the practices of collecting, describing and illustrating species. Banks had a profound impact on Kew’s development, initiating numerous expeditions to far flung areas of the world, building collections of specimens, illustrations, seeds and living plants designed to enrich the content of the gardens.

This exhibition explores British botanical expeditions to the Indo-Pacific, examining the early exploration of the Pacific and South Africa by figures such as Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and Francis Masson. It then moves on to analyse the development of ‘natural systems’ of classification analysing the Australian collections of Robert Brown compiled while travelling on HMS Investigator with Matthew Flinders. The final sections analyse how the knowledge of Indigenous people, especially Māori in New Zealand, influenced the collector Allan Cunningham’s approaches to collecting information and methods of publishing these results.

This is a Collaborative project involving Dr Edwin Rose, Centre for History and Philosophy of Science, School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science; Prof. Staffan Müller-Wille, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge; Fiona Ainsworth, library and Archives, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.