Anthoethnography: Emerging Research into the Culture of Flora, Aesthetic Experience of Plants, and the Wildflower Tourism of the Future

Abstract

As agents of healing, purveyors of ornamentation, symbols of inspiration, inciters of attraction, and repositories of beauty, flowers hold special roles in human societies worldwide (for example, see Goody). Engineered into hybrids and raised in greenhouses, cultivated flowers have particular affinities with people as common members of domesticated spheres. For example, in seventeenth-century Holland, the over-zealous love of flowers galvanised the social and economic furore over tulip flowers and bulbs known as 'tulipmania' (Goldgar 7).