Giving, getting, and growing: Philanthropy, science, and the New York Botanical Garden, 1888--1929.

摘要

In the 1890s, botanist Nathaniel Lord Britton united New York City's private Gilded Age wealth with the expertise of its professionalizing scientists in order to realize his vision of a world-class botanical research institution organized within the landscaped confines of a newly annexed Bronx park. The resulting New York Botanical Garden was constructed, in part with municipal funds, with conscious reference to a half century's precedent in landscape gardening, as well as to Britton's own memories of England's premier botanic garden, Kew. It was understood by the city's civic elite (who remained wedded to mid-century environmentalist ideas regarding the social powers of landscaped parks) as an effort to recapture a grand and prestigious outdoor urban space in the tradition of Olmsted's Central Park, one with the potential to exert a salutary moral influence over the city's population.; Britton's foremost concern was the establishment of a New York venue for botanical science. Convinced of the necessity of American scientific independence from European repositories of knowledge, Britton used the Garden to create a specifically American space for the practice of New World botany by mounting a series of expeditions that catalogued the flora of the Western Hemisphere, including, significantly, the US colony of Puerto Rico. Britton sought to situate the NYBG within the profitable context of practical science; in doing so, he privileged the needs of a scientific institution over those of a picturesque public park.; Britton's success in establishing the Garden illustrates the ways in which taxonomic botany remained a crucial scientific endeavor into the twentieth century and beyond. Though eclipsed in various institutional agendas, floristic and monographic botany never lost their place as a foundation for the efforts of all botanical researchers. Britton's efforts also fostered the transition of the city's botanical endeavors from the realm of a nineteenth century amateur to that of a professional whose living was earned entirely from efforts on behalf of the Garden. Britton's career ultimately enabled the New York Botanical Garden to rank among the most important institutions established in the City of New York prior to the turn of the twentieth century.