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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:From 'Mere Weeds' and 'Bosjes' to a Cape Floral Kingdom: The Re-Imaging of Indigenous Flora at the Cape, c.1890-1939
Author:Van Sittert, LanceISNI
Year:2002
Periodical:Kronos: Journal of Cape History
Issue:28
Pages:102-126
Language:English
Geographic terms:South Africa
The Cape
Subjects:botany
flora
Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment
History and Exploration
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/41056484
Abstract:The flora of the Cape Colony (in present-day South Africa) was long the subject of imperial classification and cultivation in Europe, and complete settler indifference in the southwestern Cape. However, the gradual indigenization and institutionalization of botany at the Cape and mobilization of a middle-class constituency enabled local botanists to mould official policy in accordance with their notion of a unique but endangered regional flora. This was evident in their attempts to suppress a burgeoning wild flower trade. The granting of independence to a new omnibus settler nation-State in 1910, however, stripped the Cape Town middle class of political power and State patronage for its botanical mission. The latter was urgently recast in national terms, attempting to solicit State funding for a 'national' botanical garden at Kirstenbosch with the promise of indigenous cash crops to facilitate national economic development. Cape botany embraced a nationalism which was a peculiar ideological hybrid of cosmopolitan and nativist strands of geographic nationalism, seeking to nationalize and naturalize the imperial connection. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]
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