ASHMOLEAN BLOOMS FOR SPRING

The Ashmolean’s big exhibition for 2026 is In Bloom: How Plants Changed our World. It opens on 19 March and continues until 16 August (see below for further detail). In numerous ways the exhibition gets to the very heart of the Ashmolean Museum itself, which owes its existence to two obsessive gardeners who set out to ‘collect the world’.

In the seventeenth century John Tradescant the Elder and the Younger, gardeners to royalty and aristocracy, travelled to the Low Countries, France, Russia and North America, gathering plants, seeds, specimens and intriguing objects that later formed the Ashmolean’s founding collection. In Bloom returns to this original moment, examining how plants were acquired, classified and circulated in the seventeenth century, and how the wish to grow and understand them shaped knowledge and culture.

The journey from the seventeenth century to our back gardens in 2026 is made easy because so many of the plants we take for granted had these near-miraculous journeys behind them but we simply didn’t know. Many of our most beloved species of plants and flowers, including tulips, roses, orchids and camellias, reached Britain through the networks of empire linking Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Seeds, dried specimens and living plants travelled along the same maritime and commercial routes that transported people and goods, a movement that often depended on the expertise of local people that went unrecorded in Western accounts.

Some arrivals triggered intense public interest. Tulips fuelled the Dutch speculative bubble known as ‘tulipomania’ which, at its height in the 1630s, saw rare tulip bulbs being sold at the cost of a canal-side house. Ferns, orchids and rhododendrons too inspired later Victorian collecting frenzies. Other plants became woven into everyday life. Tea, now integral to British identity, grew into a powerful commodity whose cultivation and trade had far-reaching economic and political effects.

Oxford, meanwhile, played a central role in advancing botanical knowledge. The University’s Physic Garden, founded in 1621 – the oldest botanical garden in Britain – provided a controlled environment for testing how unfamiliar species adapted to new conditions.

Early herbaria (dried, pressed plants), seed collections and teaching aids were developed here. The exhibition includes an extraordinary group of nineteenth-century papier-mâché models of enlarged plants and flowers that were made so that students could see intricate botanical structures for scientific study.

Another innovation featured in the exhibition is the ‘Wardian Case’ (c. 1870), a revolutionary sealed glass container, developed by Nathaniel Ward in the 1840s. This ingeniously simple solution facilitated long-distance plant transport and made it possible for living specimens to survive long voyages, encouraging the mass movement of plants across the world.

This transportation of plants came with significant costs to colonised and indigenous peoples. As European demand for profitable and desirable species grew, collecting and cultivation began to reshape local ecologies and economies. In many regions, land was reorganised for export crops and large single-species plantations, creating ‘monocultures’ that replaced local biodiversity and made communities more vulnerable to environmental and economic shocks.

Britain’s role in the opium trade, which contributed directly to the Opium Wars (1839–60), was a notoriously exploitative chapter in the nation’s history. The global spread of tea and other cash crops shows how botanical collecting, commerce and imperial ambition often carried consequences beyond the plants themselves.

Besides history, In Bloom explores the visual traditions that shaped how plants were recorded and understood. Paintings, drawings and prints by some of the greatest botanical artists of all time – Rachel Ruysch, Maria Sibylla Merian, Georg Dionysius Ehret and Ferdinand Bauer – show how artists and illustrators became essential to identifying species, comparing varieties and sharing information across borders.

This was also the period in which Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) set out the system of naming and classifying plants that is still used today. This legacy remains visible in the work of some of the most celebrated modern botanical artists – Rory McEwen, Pandora Sellars and Fiona Strickland – whose exceptional works are also on view.

The exhibition closes with new contemporary works by Anahita Norouzi, Kate Friend, Işık Güner, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Justine Smith. Their works range from human-sized botanical drawings to spectacular tapestries designed from the perspective of pollinating insects.

These are followed by Fran Monks’s photographic commission spotlighting five leading Oxford academics working at the forefront of plant science and conservation today, whose research is expanding our understanding of the environment, ecology and our changing climate. Seen together, these works demonstrate how the impulse to study, protect and reinterpret the plant world continues to shape both scientific thinking and public imagination.

Dr Francesca Leoni and Dr Shailendra Bhandare, co-curators of the exhibition, say: ‘In Bloom offers the rare chance to understand, appreciate and contemplate the histories of some of our best loved blooms. Unravelling stories of great scientific achievements, daredevil explorations and networks of exceptional individuals, it presents a vivid curatorial account of how our world was changed by our interactions with plants, through outstanding objects, with a conscious attempt at delivering an environmentally responsible exhibition.’