ABSTRACT
The invention of indoor gardening is almost never associated with socio-historical aspects of the eighteenth century. Initially, the emergence of indoor gardening in connection with botanical scholarship and the new sciences was also linked to the insight that plants played a vital role for the earth’s atmosphere. While scholars were at the forefront of the new interest in botany, late eighteenth-century ‘botanophilia’ – the enthusiasm for botanizing, that is for collecting, drying and categorizing plants – was shared by many others. Exotic houseplants and rare species of plants demonstrated the wealth of the family. The bourgeois preference for indoor plants, and particularly exotic plants, became part of luxury and domestic consumption, displaying wealth and sophistication. During the early stages of the introduction of houseplants, medical discourses played an important role. With indoor plants becoming an increasingly common feature in homes and households in the nineteenth century, they developed into an integral part of bourgeois home decor.
