Losing foreignness: Johann Sigismund Elsholtz on the meaning of plants in the pleasure gardens of Berlin

Abstract

As a result of trade and commerce in global empires, plants from around the world could be found growing in gardens throughout Europe, including Germany. Johann Sigismund Elsholtz (1623–1688), a member of the Leopoldina scientific academy, would never personally travel to the Americas or Asia, but he had direct experience with plants from abroad under his care in the pleasure gardens of Berlin. Elsholtz composed several editions of a work that focused on the role of climate in growing a garden. For it was the climate, and not so much the soil, that posed the most significant challenge for the gardens he supervised, especially for the foreign plants. Curiously, Elsholtz's work is selective on which plants it categorizes as foreign; the category is also malleable, and proper acclimation of a plant was a first step for it no longer to be called foreign. In this paper, I explore the question of how plants lose their foreignness and take on a new, domestic meaning.