The Duchess of Botany: Mary Somerset, Jacob Bobart, and the Formation of the Oxford Botanic Garden

This project focuses on the relationship between Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort (1630-1715), a prominent noblewoman and botanical collector, and Jacob Bobart the younger (1641- 1719), second superintendent of the Botanic Garden at Oxford (following his father, Jacob Bobart the elder). Substantial exchanges of botanical material, information, and expertise were undertaken between the Garden under Bobart and the Duchess's gardens at Badminton.

The project will leverage manuscript and herbaria records to analyse these transactions in unprecedented detail. As such, the studentship will elucidate key aspects of the Oxford Botanic Garden's early history, focusing on the material and intellectual networks that supported the development of its plant collections and institutional structures during the later seventeenth century.

Research will therefore directly complement attention to OBGA's heritage in preparation for celebrating the Botanic Garden's 400th anniversary in 2021.

While scholars have attended productively to the Duchess's patronage of botany and horticulture, little research has been conducted into the specific plant specimens (and associated archival documents) that survive inter alia at Oxford University Herbaria and the Natural History Museum. This project will rectify that scholarly omission, conscious of Mark Laird's instructive observation that without such work we possess 'only a preliminary and conjectural history of a very significant patron in the realm of flowers' (A Natural History of English Gardening, 2015).

Focusing on the relationship between Bobart and the Duchess also enables the project to emphasise the roles of women in the formation of botanical networks and knowledge. Although Mary was unusually privileged in social and economic terms, she functions as a valuable case-study for uncovering how women during the period engaged as contributors to natural science.

How did the Duchess's identity as a woman and status as the wife of a peer impact her relationships with horticultural labourers and botanical scholars? To what extent did she involve other women in her botanical network, and what contribution did they make to its social, intellectual, and economic structures?

Bobart's relationship with the Duchess is central within broader networks of botanical exchange that this project excavates. Both were actively connected to botanical experts and suppliers, including institutional centres (above all, the Chelsea Physic Garden and the Royal Society); individual collectors, like William Sherard (who importantly brought financial security to the Garden via his endowment of the Sherardian Chair of Botany), Hans Sloane, and Leonard Plukenet; and commercial gardeners such as George London and Thomas Fairchild.

How did these stakeholders collaborate and compete to acquire and categorise new plants from across Britain and the globe? What botanical knowledge and horticultural skill was generated (and/or disrupted) as a consequence? What was the early Oxford Botanic Garden's role and significance as a centre of botany and horticulture?

In addition to these historical questions, this research contributes importantly to Oxford University's understanding of its institutional heritage. Cole will reconnect repositories that speak to the Garden's history, including site-specific materials at OBGA, botanical matter in the University Herbaria, and manuscripts at the Bodleian. By mapping these resources for research purposes - so that early-modern plants, print, and papers are re-engaged in dialogue together - the doctoral candidate will also be enabled to account for the later institutional fortunes of the Botanic Garden (between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries) through understanding the dispersal and reorganisation of its archive elsewhere.

Relevant external repositories will also be consulted, including the British Library, Natural History Museum, and Badminton Muniments.