Visualizing Nature, Empire, and Nation in the Mexican Botanical Garden, 1787–1821

This paper focuses on the creation and development of the Mexican Botanical Garden, which spanned the colonial and national periods. The Garden was created by the Royal Botanical Expedition (1787-1803), which was the most ambitious effort by the Spanish Crown to study the natural resources of the New World. Conducted in a period when much of Europe was scrambling to study and exploit its colonial resources, this expedition was unique in that it was carried out almost entirely by people from Mexico, rather than from the colonial metropolis. This paper pays particular attention to the question of what this Garden can teach us about how Mexicans, as they shifted from the colonial to the independence era, laid the foundations for a nationalist understanding of Mexico's nature and landscape, and how this understandings affected broader policy. It focuses on the botanical illustrations created through the garden and the expedition, visual plans for the lay out of the garden, and the visual and spatial experience of the garden itself by scientists as well as by the public. Moreover, this was a garden created to help the empire know and exploit its resources, yet it was one of the few colonial institutions that was embraced by the post-independence government. By linking the Garden to the emerging nationalist views of nature and landscape, this paper attempts to explain the its unusual survival and how its mission changed, and how it contributed to a visual vocabulary of nationhood in the 19th century that included both scientific and aesthetic views of nature.