Acclimatizing Wild Rice for Empire

In 1805 Sir Joseph Banks published “Some Hints Respecting the Proper Mode of Inuring Tender Plants to Our Climate,” a brief article—and one of very few publications of his career—on the acclimatization of foreign plants from cold and tropical environments to Britain. He devoted a large portion to describing his experiments with North American wild rice (Zizania aquatica) at his Spring Grove estate in the suburbs of London. Drawing inspiration from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travelers’ accounts of wild rice growing in swamps, rivers, and ponds from the Mississippi Valley to the length of the eastern seaboard, Banks believed Zizania was a highly adaptable plant that would prove easy to cultivate in a variety of climatic zones. While European observers described indigenous harvesting practices, they believed Native Americans did nothing to control or develop the plant and gathered it in a wild state. Banks (and several other British and American naturalists) thus hoped that an improved variety could be introduced to Irish bogs to feed the poor and in southern Australia as a subsistence crop for new settlers. Like breadfruit transplanted to the Caribbean, wild rice promised the productive transformation of wastelands with little labor input or specialized knowledge; unlike breadfruit, it could be grown in non-tropical climates. But Zizania proved to be an obstinate plant. Banks ultimately had difficulty fully naturalizing it in England and therefore never tested his vision for establishing wild rice plantations across the empire. My paper will situate Banks’ wild rice experiments in relation to other unsuccessful eighteenth-century acclimatization schemes. In particular, it will consider the extent to which failure resulted from naturalists’ focus on manipulating climatic requirements rather than on learning and adapting Native cultivation techniques.