Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on plants – in many versions - on a Danish estate around 1800, exploring the tensions between plants construed as botanical specimens by the owner, a prominent botanist, and plants as crops in the transformation of the estate into a plantationocene landscape.

Paper long abstract:

In an old account book of expenditures and income and work done and to be done at Bistrup Gård, an estate in Zealand, Denmark, from 1806, a tiny, dried plant is placed between some of the many pages of accounts of money earned and spend through the operation of the estate as an indication of the owner's botanical interest. Niels Hofman-Bang was not only a patron of botanists as a generous host but was also a prominent botanist himself and especially renowned for his studies of algae and their capacities in transforming shallow water into fertile land. At the same time, he was one of the most famous agricultural reformers, and the purchase of Bistrup Gaard aimed precisely at experimenting with new, market-oriented modes of operations that could not be done inside the existing social organization of work. What is noticeable is that these two practices; the botanical and the agricultural reformist, only very little and rarely actually met. In the paper, I discuss how and when these two rationales or practices would come together.