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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the expansion of 19th-century urban life in both Europe and in the tropical Andes led to a redistribution of plant species as a consequence of the expansion of the global trade of ornamental plants that promoted an international exchange unseen since the Columbian exchange.

Paper long abstract:

In 1887, the Englishman Albert Millican travelled through the Colombian Andes collecting orchids for the Veitch Nurseries in Chelsea. He gathered more than 10,000 plants and sent them back to England for sale to urban gardeners. Two years later, William McLane, an agent representing the Rochester's Live Plant Company from New York, signed a contract with the municipality of Bogotá to supply 30,000 plants commonly used in Europe for the city's parks. As a result, in the late nineteenth century, cities like Bogotá and London became ‘floristic islands’, with a higher concentration of imported plants than the regions surrounding them. This paper explores the transatlantic market in ornamental plants that emerged alongside the nineteenth-century urban expansion in Europe and South America. Analysing the trade in plants from a global perspective, the research reinterprets the role of plant hunters, botanical gardens and urban planners as key actors within an extractive industry built upon informal colonial relationships. The paper investigates how demand for tropical plants led to a ‘controlled tropicalisation’ of European cities, and, conversely, how the application of horticultural knowledge in urban planning led to the ‘Europeanisation’ of urban biodiversity in the Andean region. Alongside historical sources, including archives, newspapers and other publications, the research draws extensively on botanical collections and associated materials in Europe, the United States, and South America. For the first time, this investigation shows how particular urban aesthetic trends associated with nineteenth-century urbanisation entailed a redistribution of global biodiversity at a scale unseen since the Columbian exchange.