This book highlights the close interactions between plants, plant knowledge, politics, and social life in Padua during the age of revolution. It explores the lives and thoughts of two brothers, the lawyer Andrea Meneghini and the botanist Giuseppe
Meneghini, illustrating the unspoken dreams of progress and a new social order, but also sheds light on the ambiguous relationship between the Paduan elite and Austrian rule before the 1848 revolution. A closer look at park designs, gardening associations and networks, fl ower exhibitions, agricultural societies, organicist metaphors, and botanical research on the organization of living bodies opens up unexpected parallels between actors and ideas of two apparently distant areas: botany and political economy.
1. Introduction.-
2. Paduan Networks.-
3. Plants and the Social Climb of the Meneghini Family.-
4. Garden Policies.-
5. Growing Up in A Progessive Environment. -6. Organization, Cooperation, and Progress in the Paduan Political Economy.-
7. Progress, Evolution, and Cellular Constitution.-
8. The Sweeping Power of Horticulture.-
9. Cultivating Lands and People.-
10. Revolutionaries and Their Failures.-
11. Conclusion.
Ariana Droscher is an independent scholar based in Bologna, Italy.
