Paper Gardens: Art, Botany, and Empire

Paper Gardens invites you to a world of art, science, and plants. Set in the Indian subcontinent—one of the most biodiverse regions on earth—the exhibition traces how plants were studied, drawn, and circulated at the height of the British empire.

For centuries, plants have shaped human life—as food, medicine, ornament, and symbol. From the 17th century onwards, they also became objects of scientific ambition. Botany was a pursuit of total knowledge: to record, name, and organise the entire plant world.

Between the 18th and 19th centuries, the Indian subcontinent became a site of intense scientific activity. The botanical image was central to this, and artists across the region worked closely with European botanists to build a corpus of several thousand botanical drawings. Created in close proximity to the plants—in gardens, forests, and fields—these works are precise and attentive. They reveal the interior and exterior worlds of plants with striking clarity, transforming living, seasonal organisms into scientific records on paper.

These images tell a complex story—one of colonial conquest, global knowledge circulation, and the development of botany as a science. British botanists relied deeply on the knowledge of locals—plant collectors, gardeners, and artists across the region—whose labour and authorship was largely omitted from the historical record. As these drawings travelled to Europe to be engraved and published, they entered global systems of knowledge with little acknowledgement of the people that made them possible.

Paper Gardens brings together over a hundred of these illustrations, tracing encounters between
plants, artists, and institutions, and reanimating the networks of labour and imagination that have built our understanding of the natural world. The exhibition, and its accompanying publication, explore botanical drawings as living documents—as portraits of relationships between artist and patron, empire and subject, human and non-human life.

The exhibition has been made possible in partnership with Bank of America

Paper Gardens marks the continuation of a sustained, years-long collaboration between MAP and Impart—an online platform fostering greater public engagement with the art and cultural histories of South Asia.

We are grateful to Henry J Noltie, Suresh Jayaram, Annamma Spudich, Holly Shaffer, and Claire Banks, for their guidance on the project. The work of these scholars, as well as that of Sita Reddy, Mildred Archer, Malini Roy, Kapil Raj, and Indira Chowdhury in the field of botanical paintings and illustrations was foundational for the exhibition. We are also grateful to Roger Gaskell, whose knowledge of historical printmaking and books guided us in the study of botanical engravings and lithographs.