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Periodical article | Leiden University 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, Lance |
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] |