In the nineteenth century, the British government supported the creation of botanic gardens throughout the empire, with over one hundred in existence by the century’s end. Colonial garden superintendents were expected to identify and cultivate economically and medicinally valuable plants and take part in global networks of plant exchange. As scientific institutions, the colonial gardens were sites for producing and disseminating plant knowledge. These practices placed the gardens within an imperial system directed toward profit and “improvement.” The superintendent at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, became the de facto head of this system after Kew transformed from a royal to a national garden in 1841.
The proliferation of colonial gardens suggests that the British government increasingly turned to them to handle a range of botanical projects. However, these services could have been delivered by other means. This paper takes a closer look at the establishment of a botanic garden in New South Wales to explore why a garden might be founded in a colony where government officials and private individuals were already acclimatizing, collecting, and exchanging plants. Scanty documentation on the garden's early years has led scholars to use circumstantial evidence to establish 1816 or 1818 as the founding date for the botanic garden in the Sydney settlement. By examining contemporary trends in colonial governance and administration, this paper offers a new interpretation of the Sydney garden's beginnings and illustrates the political stakes of government support for botanic gardens and scientific investigation across the British empire.
