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“FAC-SIMILES OF NATURE”: VICTORIAN WAX FLOWER MODELLING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2007

Ann B. Shteir
Ann B. Shteir
Affiliation:
York University
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Extract

THE GIGANTIC WATER LILY WHOSE seeds were brought to England from the Amazon in 1847 had been sighted a decade earlier in British Guiana by Sir Robert Schomburgk and described in 1837. Named Victoria regia and now known as Victoria amazonica, the spectacular specimen had huge leaves five feet in diameter and seventeen feet in circumference, and flowers more than twelve inches in diameter. Germination of the seeds took some time, but in 1849 three plants developed, and the race was on to propagate the first flower. The triumphal first bud in England opened in early November 1849, its flower measuring three feet in circumference, at the Chatsworth estate of the Duke of Devonshire where the gardener and landscape architect, Joseph Paxton, had designed a greenhouse and water tanks for this purpose; Margaret Darby has detailed the precise attention that Paxton gave to the levels of light, moisture, and heat so as to approximate the plant's native habitat. The Victoria regia produced 126 large, beautiful, and fragrant white and pink tinted flowers. It was a popular wonder and received clamorous public attention for its size, beauty, and surprising strength. Paxton presented a leaf and flower to the Queen and Prince Albert at Windsor, and a well-known engraving in the Illustrated London News, November 17, 1849, showed Paxton's eight-year old daughter Annie standing on one of the leaves. Publication in 1851 of Victoria Regia; or Illustrations of the Royal Water-Lily with life-sized drawings and lithographs by Walter Hood Fitch and descriptions by the botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker brought further celebrity to the plant. Soon after, John and Horatio Mintorn, wax flower artists in London, were commissioned to make a model of the flower of this huge plant in different stages of development – “from the large and bristly bud to the white opening petals, and the full-blown flower, in its beautiful variegation of form and tint” (the Daily News July 17, 1850). Exhibition of the wax model generated wide press coverage about the “fac-simile…of one of the most curious botanical phenomenon of the present age” (Mintorn 1844, ii-iii).

Type
EDITORS' TOPIC: VICTORIAN NATURAL HISTORY
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , September 2007 , pp. 649 - 661
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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