ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the long tail of the Columbian Exchange in a part of the world that seems wholly unconnected to the Americas: northern Germany. In the ‘seventeenth-century moment’ in botany, though, New World foods continued to arrive and inform European state efforts to understand and control both nature and the society. The act of cataloging garden flora was a standard practice of natural observation that accompanied the humanist self-cultivation in the late Renaissance garden – and something that thus appealed to Friedrich Wilhelm. Such a catalog was a definitive tally of what the garden contained, but also might serve to advertise the magnificence of the garden. The great efforts of Friedrich Wilhelm’s team did not bear fruit for long; the Berlin palace garden was only possible in the 17th century. In 1713, the palace were razed for military parade grounds by Friedrich Wilhelm’s grandson, King Friedrich Wilhelm I, known as the “Soldier King.”.
