From “Gardens, botanical” in Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovations by Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield:
“The Aztec, whose empire was established in what is now Mexico in about A.D. 1100, planted lavish botanical gardens featuring enormous collections of plants both native to the area and imported from the tropical coast hundreds of miles distant….
“These arboretums, containing varieties of medicinal, hallucinatory, and sweet-smelling plants, were for the amusement and education of those who visited these sites. Spanish historian Cervantes de Salizar described the gardens of the Emperor Montezuma as containing ‘medicinal and aromatic herbs, flowers, and trees with fragrant blossoms.’ Not only were plants collected so that they could be preserved and displayed, they were also actively used as the basis for an elaborate system of plant classification and as laboratories for the discovery of medical break-throughs…
“The Tetzcotzinco garden of the poet-king Netzahualcoyotl, who reigned over the mountainous area of the Aztec Empire between 1426 and 1474, was legendary in its time. In 1530 one of his descendants described the experience of visiting it as being like falling into a garden raining with aromatic tropical flowers. Many of the plants there had been brought from remote places. Several botanical gardens were also a feature of the capital city of Tenochtitlan, which was the largest metropolis in North America, and perhaps the world, serving as a residence for about a quarter of a million people. Dahlias and Zinnias were two of the flowers grown in Aztec gardens that still give gardeners pleasure today.
“The Spaniards were astounded when they saw these Aztec gardens. Although some European monasteries had collections of plants in their herb gardens, they were small in comparison to the Aztec gardens. Some historians believe that the impetus for European botanical gardens came from a letter, first published in 1522, that Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes wrote to Emperor Charles V (King Charles I of Spain) describing Montezuma’s gardens…. The Cortes letter may not have directly inspired European botanical gardens, but certainly the exploration of the Western Hemisphere with its exotic flora sparked a European interest in botany….”
From “Zinnias (Zinnia elegans)” in Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovations by Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield:
“Zinnias (Zinnia elegans) are one of the three most popular garden flowers today. They are characterized by showy composite blossoms and are indigenous to the area that is called Mexico today. The blooms that zinnias produce vary in color, including white, yellow, gold, orange, copper, crimson, purple, and maroon blossoms….
“The Aztec, who established an empire in what is now Mexico in about A.D. 1100, held flowers in high regard. They cultivated several varieties of zinnias. Spaniards brought the first zinnias to Europe in 1753. The plants were named after botany professor, J. G. Zinn. In 1796 the first Zinnia elegans variety was brought to Europe from Mexico. This variety quickly became popular and is the stock to which all modern garden zinnias owe their start.”
Hello!
This is the second of three posts with new photographs of Zinnias from Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Revisiting Zinnias (1 of 3). In that first post, I presented distribution maps of the Zinnia genus and two well-known species — Zinnia peruviana and Zinnia elegans — and briefly described some of what I learned about how zinnias were native to parts of North and South America; how they migrated from there to Europe and parts of Asia, Africa, and Australia; and how Zinnia elegans was reintroduced to the Americas in conjunction with plant exploration upon the breeding of new variants after their European assimilation.
Researching these complex stories involves multiple disciplines like traditional history, botany, and social and cultural history — especially around European exploration, imperialism, and conquest, where plants went along for the rides. European or Eurocentric frameworks tend to dominate botanical literature for many reasons, the most benign of which was that botanists and scientists from about the 17th century forward sought to document their naturalist encounters in extensive detail. That included adapting local knowledge from regions they explored, producing extensive botanical tracts, and incorporating images (botanical drawings and art) before (and continuing after) photography was used for that reason. Yet even though much of this was geographically anchored to Europe, the migrations and reintroductions of plants like Zinnias trigger a way to expand that framework and include other regions, their cultures, and their histories.
With all that in mind, I was pretty happy to discover that a book I already owned — A History of Zinnias: Flower for the Ages by Eric Grissell — devotes about three chapters and nearly 100 pages to the Zinnia movement I had started exploring. Here are 5,000 words summarizing the author’s research.
Haha, just kidding. However, if you click the link above, the Kindle sample will get you to the beginning of one of the relevant chapters, and I certainly recommend the book to anyone interested in the kind of research I cover here about botany and plant histories. It was from that book that I learned about the one I excerpted above — Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovations by Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield — which is available on the Internet Archive and, among other topics, covers hundreds of native North and South American plant species and describes their cultural, ornamental, or medicinal use. In the case of Zinnias, the two books together helped me anchor on and decide to include the two excerpts above, as they reposition Zinnia’s history outside the European frameworks and represent the significance of this plant species to American indigenous cultures for hundreds of years prior to being encountered by explorers from Spain.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
