This is the post-print version of a published paper. When referencing, please cite the published paper:

Helen Anne Curry, "Naturalizing the Exotic and Exoticising the Naturalized: Horticulture,

Natural History and the Rosy Periwinkle", Environment and History 18 (2012): 343–365.

DOI: 10.3197/096734012X13400389809292 Naturalizing the Exotic and Exoticizing the Naturalized: Horticulture, Natural History, and the Rosy Periwinkle Helen Anne Curry Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Cambridge Free School Lane Cambridge CB2 3RH hac44@cam.ac.uk Abstract

The rosy periwinkle, a plant originating in the rainforest of Madagascar, is best known for its use in modern biomedicine as a cancer therapy and as a symbol of the importance of biodiversity conservation. Yet images of the plant as a novel therapeutic and an endangered exotic obscure its commonness, for it is both naturalized in many parts of the world as a weed, and has long been used as an ornamental plant in greenhouses and gardens. This seeming contradiction is the result of the rosy periwinkle’s long history as a horticultural variety, especially its transition over a two-hundred-year period from being understood as a hothouse exotic to being seen as native and commonplace. Horticultural practices generated changes in the distribution and biology of the rosy periwinkle and this in turn generated changes in people’s valuation of the species. Through a horticultural history of the rosy periwinkle, this paper explores how ideas about what constitutes an exotic or naturalized species, and the value attached to these, can dramatically shape and then reshape the natural history of a species. It suggests why such attention to such plasticity is important both for historians and for conservation. Keywords Rosy periwinkle, horticulture, gardening, exotics

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Naturalizing the Exotic and Exoticizing the Naturalized: Horticulture, Natural History, and the Rosy Periwinkle Introduction: ‘The rare rosy periwinkle’

In the mid-1980s a World Wildlife Fund advertising campaign sought to bring attention

to global biodiversity loss and habitat destruction. One advertisement, which ran for more than

five years, featured an image of the flowering plant commonly called the rosy or Madagascar

periwinkle. The plant was an apt choice, for the flower is best known for its use in Western

medicine, as the source of two compounds discovered in the 1960s to be effective in treating

certain cancers.1 Its survival was therefore of clear importance. The advertisement highlighted

the fragility of the ecosystem from which the plant originated, the tropical rainforest of

Madagascar, ‘where thousands of endemic plants are in danger’.2 (See figure 1.) Given its

important therapeutic uses, the rosy periwinkle served as a truly potent symbol for the utility of

preserving in situ biodiversity in the 1980s and early 1990s. It became a handy reference for a

number of causes and campaigns, most notably those concerned with the conservation of

biodiversity.3 Individuals and groups bolstered their causes by describing the ‘rare rosy

1 The two compounds are the alkaloids vincristine and vinblastine. For an account of their

discovery, see Jacalyn Duffin, ‘Poisoning the Spindle: Serendipity and the Discovery of the Anti-Tumor Properties of the Vinca Alkaloids’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 17 (2000): 155-192.

2 WWF Advertisement, BioScience, September 1984, 537. 3 This includes advocacy for environmental causes such as the Endangered Species Act (for

example, Jon Roush, ‘Plants and Animals Save Human Lives’, New York Times, 23 May 1995, A16), the conservation of global biodiversity (for example, John C. Sawhill, ‘What Good Are Pupfish and Periwinkles?’ New York Times, 9 June 1990, 23; and William Clinton, ‘A Global Challenge for the New Century’, Time, 26 April 2000, 25), and the Wilderness Act (for example, Gaylord Nelson, New York Times, 4 September 1984, A21), among others. It also is a symbol of the medical and environmental advances to be achieved through bio-prospecting (for example, Leslie Roberts, ‘Chemical Prospecting: Hope for Vanishing Ecosystems?’ Science 256, no. 5060 (1992): 1142-3) or, alternately, the potential for exploitation of developing countries via bio-colonialism or bio-piracy (for example, Richard Stone, ‘The Biodiversity Treaty: Pandora's Box or Fair Deal?’ Science 256, no. 5064 (1992):

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periwinkle’, an ‘obscure flower’ nearly extinct in Madagascar, or as one Associated Press news

release claimed, a plant ‘which deforestation nearly wiped out’.4

Yet some who encountered these references might have found the tropical flower

described more familiar than rare, for the same plant had since the eighteenth century circulated

as a greenhouse or garden flower, often referred to by its original botanical designation of

‘vinca’. Far from being a symbol of fragility, the garden-variety rosy periwinkle was understood

in the twentieth century to be a hardy plant. As a 1992 New York Times article reported of the

flower, one ‘could drop a boiling elephant on a vinca and it would survive’.5 Moreover, the rosy

periwinkle today is a weedy perennial, biologically naturalized around the globe wherever

climate and geography allow. Thus even the natural history of the rosy periwinkle (the species

Catharanthus roseus), its global distribution and its ecological characterization, suggests a

different story than one might extrapolate from some conservation literature.

This disjuncture among its presentations in different discourses – conservation,

gardening, and natural-historical description – is the result of the rosy periwinkle’s long history

in Madagascar, Europe, and America. This is particularly evident in its history as a horticultural

variety, which encompassed multiple transitions of the plant between the categories of ‘exotic’

and ‘naturalized’. By tracing the history of the rosy periwinkle as used in horticulture, this paper

draws attention to the interplay between cultural or scientific discourse and an organism’s

biology – between human thought and natural history. As I argue here, the case of the rosy

periwinkle offers one example of how human ideas of what constitutes exotic and naturalized,

1624).

4 For the ‘rare rosy periwinkle’ see Sawhill, ‘What Good Are Pupfish’; for the ‘obscure flower’ see Roush, ‘Plants and Animals Save Human Lives’; for ‘nearly wiped out’ see Cheryl Wittenauer, ‘Saving Rare Plants from Extinction Is Botanists' Mission; 600 Imperiled Species Are Targeted’, Washington Post, 3 August 2003, A16.

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and the cultural appeal of objects that fall within these two categories, have altered the natural

histories of species.

This horticultural history of the rosy periwinkle, therefore, speaks to larger concerns in

environmental history about how one incorporates changeable species into historical narratives.

Edmund Russell, in his formulation of ‘evolutionary history’ as a component of environmental

history, has made an argument for the importance of historicizing organisms by investigating

anthropocentric evolution. This paper follows his lead by focusing on what he calls ‘organismal

plasticity’ – in this case, the rosy periwinkle’s ability to insinuate itself into different cultural and

environmental niches that have changed over time as human needs, concerns, and uses of the

environment have changed.6 Although this history does not directly address other aspects of the

history of the rosy periwinkle in medical practice or in conservation, as these subjects have been

treated elsewhere, it nonetheless suggests the pathways through which knowledge of the plant

became fragmented by the end of the twentieth century and the implications of this

fragmentation.7

As I argue here, the natural histories of particular species have played a part in

determining discourse about the exotic and the naturalized. Historians have charted the changes

over time in preferences for ‘exotic’ and ‘native’ species and noted the movement of species

between these categories. They have shown how changing preferences for ‘exotic’ and ‘native’

5 Michael Winerup, ‘At Play in the Fields of Vinca’, New York Times, 16 August 1992, 37. 6 Edmund Russell, ‘Evolutionary History: Prospectus for a New Field’, Environmental History

8, no. 2 (2003): 204-28. 7 On the uses of the periwinkle in medicine, see Duffin, ‘Poisoning the Spindle’; Gordon

Svoboda, ‘The Role of the Alkaloids of Catharanthus Roseus (L.) G. Don (Vinca Rosea) and Their Derivatives in Cancer Chemotherapy,’ in Plants: The Potential for Extracting Protein, Medicines, and Other Useful Chemicals: Workshop Proceedings (Washington, DC: U.S. OTA, 1983), 154-69. On the periwinkle in relation to conservation, see: Jennie Wood Sheldon, Michael J. Balick, and Sarah Laird, Medicinal Plants: Can Utilization and

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species have both reflected broader social concerns and shaped the ecological composition of

entire regions. For the most part, however, they have not sought to connect changes in discourse

about the exoticness of a species with changes in that species’ biology and natural history.8 It is

only by bringing these biological understandings of exotic and naturalized into conversation with

cultural and social meanings of those terms that we can see the interconnectedness of evolving

ideas and the changing natural history of a species. As the history of the rosy periwinkle

demonstrates, this interconnectedness carries important implications for history and

conservation, in terms of how we understand and assign value to both species and the ecosystems

they – and we – inhabit.

Exotic Origins: ‘As this plant is a great novelty in Europe’

The cultures of scientific and popular plant collecting provided the first mechanism

through which the natural history of the rosy periwinkle was altered: European interest in the

Conservation Coexist? (New York: New York Botanical Garden, 1997), 12-17.

8 For ideas about exotic and native species, see Marcus Hall, ‘Editorial: The Native, Naturalized and Exotic―Plants and Animals in Human History’, Landscape Research 28, no. 1 (2003): 5-9; Philip J. Pauly, ‘The Beauty and Menace of the Japanese Cherry Trees: Conflicting Visions of American Ecological Independence’, Isis 87, no. 1 (1996): 51-73; Kenneth R. Olwig, ‘Natives and Aliens in the National Landscape’, Landscape Research 28, no. 1 (2003): 61-74; Philip J. Pauly, ‘The Interpretation of Horticulture’, Raritan 23, no. 4 (2004): 111-24. Also on this subject, and addressing the history and historiography of plant transfers more generally is William Beinart and Karen Middleton, ‘Plant Transfers in Historical Perspective: A Review Article’, Environment and History 10, no. 1 (2004): 3-29. There is also a considerable amount of scholarship in the history of science on ideas of the exotic, focusing especially on colonialism and eighteenth-century Europe. See Michael Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Londa Schiebinger ‘Exotic Abortifacients: The Global Politics of Plants in the 18th Century’, Endeavour 24, no. 3 (2000): 117-21; Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Louise Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). For a broader perspective see contributions to G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter,

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plant as an exotic species led to a dramatic increase in its global distribution. This occurred as

part of a much larger, and mostly European imperial, project of natural history collection.

Whether born of an interest in discovering the secrets of biogeography and the history of life, in

the resources available in colonial holdings, or in the amassing of natural objects (especially

species not native to Europe) as a symbol of status or according to fashion, natural history

collections flourished during this period. The collection, identification, and subsequent

cataloguing and distribution of the rosy periwinkle took place as part of this much wider set of

activities that involved charting the plants and animals – and particularly the plants – of the

world.9

The first recorded notice by Europeans of what we know today as the rosy periwinkle

appeared in 1658, in a descriptive account of the island of Madagascar. Etienne De Flacourt,

governor of a French colony on the island between 1648 and 1655, provided a physical

description that compared the plant to others more familiar to his European contemporaries – he

noted a plant that looked like a soapwort, with white or purple flowers similar to those of

jasmine. He also described the local uses of the plant, including its application against heart

Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester University, 1989).

9 The history of how and why the collection of natural history specimens became a project of immense importance to both individuals and to imperial powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been well documented elsewhere. See, for example, Osborne, Nature, the Exotic; Londa L. Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); E. C. Spary, Utopia's Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). On exploration and the science of plant and animal distribution, see Janet Browne, ‘Biogeography and Empire’, in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 305-21. On economic botany and the search for useful plants, see Schiebinger, Plants and Empire; Lucile Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979); David Mackay, ‘Agents of Empire: The Banksian Collectors and Evaluation of New Lands’, in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns

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ailments.10 After its notice by de Flacourt the plant travelled from Madagascar to Europe and

then throughout the world, likely first as a dried herbarium specimen but later as seed or whole

plant from which it could be reproduced.11

Thus the rosy periwinkle entered European culture as an exotic specimen, and as such

held a place among curiosities and rarities from around the world. The rosy periwinkle at this

time and place was seen as exotic in two distinct, though related, ways. It was catalogued as

exotic in a biological or biogeographical sense, a plant not indigenous to Europe but imported

from the tropics and therefore in need of particular care, for example in a greenhouse or

hothouse, in order to survive in a different climate. The early eighteenth century botanist Richard

Bradley gave evidence of this understanding of the term when he distinguished the management

of recently imported ‘exotic plants’ not known to grow in England not only from native species,

but also from ‘those Foreigners, which are already naturalized to our Country’.12

The rosy periwinkle was exotic in a second sense, one not referring specifically to its

provenance. The plant was a curiosity, a rarity, and like other importations from the tropics to

Europe and later to the United States, prized chiefly for this quality. The British writer John

Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 38-57.

10 Etienne de Flacourt and Claude Allibert, Histoire De La Grande Isle Madagascar (Paris: INALCO, 1995), 203; see also Pierre Boiteau, ‘Sur La Première Mention Imprimée Et Le Premier Échantillon De Catharanthus Roseus (L.) G Don’, Adansonia, ser. 2 12, no. 1 (1972): 129-135.

11 For discussion of early botanical specimens, see Boiteau, ‘Sur La Première Mention Imprimée’; for discussion of later global transfers, see Robert van der Heijden et al., ‘The Catharanthus Alkaloids: Pharmacognosy and Biotechnology’, Current Medical Chemistry 11 (2004), 607-28 (esp. 611-2).

12 Richard Bradley, New improvements of planting and gardening, both philosophical and practical (London: for W. Mears, 1718), 38. This meaning of exotic, as distinct from naturalized, resonates with current meanings. According to one recent botanical definition, an exotic is ‘a plant or animal which is kept, usually in a semi-natural or artificial manner, in a region outside its natural provenance’. From ‘Exotic’, in The Dictionary of Physical Geography, ed. David S.G. Thomas and Andrew Goudie (Blackwell Publishers, 2000).

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Evelyn noted in his Kalendarium Hortense, or gardener’s almanac, of 1706 the gardener’s

concern for ‘preserving his more tender, rare, exotic, and costly’ plants, a use of ‘exotic’ that

conveys this alternative meaning.13 Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau describe this quality of the

exotic as ‘whatever lies beyond the horizon of our mental maps of the familiar, conjuring up

fascination and terror alike’.14 The rosy periwinkle, like other plants newly discovered by

Europeans abroad and rarely encountered in their gardens at home, was an entity that lay beyond

the familiar, requiring attention from the gardener that a native European species never would

and therefore acquiring a cultural status they did not.

Bringing a new species into Western science and culture demanded its being named and

classified – the first step in making it familiar. As de Flacourt made sense of the unfamiliar plant

by describing it in comparison to those known in Europe, so Linnaeus in his classification

grouped it with a well-known plant family. In 1759, Linnaeus named and catalogued as Vinca

rosea the plant described by de Flacourt. This choice reflected the plant’s obvious physical

similarities to the vincas, or periwinkles, of which two species were then common in Europe.

Later recognition of significant differences between the periwinkles and their relatives from

Madagascar led to the latter’s placement in a new genus. In 1838, the British botanist George

Don renamed the species Catharanthus roseus, the name by which it is now known in scientific

literature; however, this name was not widely accepted when it was published, nor it has it

entirely replaced the term Vinca rosea even today, especially in horticultural literature.15

13 John Evelyn, Kalendarium hortense: or, the gard’ner’s almanac, tenth edition (London: for

Robert Scot, Richard Chiswell, George Sawbridge, and Benjamin Tooke, 1706), 136. 14 G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, ‘Introduction’, in Exoticism in the Enlightenment, 4. 15 For debates over the correct name of the plant, see John D. Dwyer, ‘The Taxonomy of the

Genera Vinca, Lochnera, and Catharanthus’, Lloydia 27, no. 4 (1964), and also William T. Stearn, ‘A Synopsis of the Genus Catharanthus (Apocynaceae)’, in The Catharanthus Alkaloids: Botany, Chemistry, Pharmacology, and Clinical Use, ed. William I. Taylor and

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Where Linnaeus’s taxonomic project emphasized the rosy periwinkle’s similarities to

known species, much as de Flacourt’s did, other early descriptions tended to underscore the

novelty of the plant. In his 1760 Figures of the Most Beautiful, Useful, and Uncommon Plants,

Philip Miller, curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, noted a new species of vinca that

‘is a great Novelty in Europe’. He described the origin of the plant in his possession: ‘The Seeds

of this Plant were brought from Madagascar to Paris, and sown in the King’s Garden at Trianon,

where they succeeded; and from thence I was furnished with the seeds, which succeeded in the

Chelsea Garden’. The description appeared with drawing of the plant, which Miller claimed as

the first printed image of the flower.16 (See figure 2.) Novelty was evidently important on two

levels, biological (the plant was a recently introduced species) and cultural (Miller was the first

to cultivate the plant in England, and the image by Miller was the first to be produced of it).

Miller may have been responsible for the rapid spread of the plant from England to other

parts of the world. During his tenure as curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden, from 1722 to

1770, he encouraged the growth of a seed exchange programme among the various botanical and

medicinal gardens of Europe and the British colonies.17 As at least one historian has suggested,

the rosy periwinkle was likely to have been included in Miller’s seed exchanges,18 although the

proliferation of seed exchanges among European gardens in the late eighteenth century likely

Norman R. Farnsworth (New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1975), 13-17.

16 Philip Miller, Figures of the Most Beautiful, Useful, and Uncommon Plants (London, 1760), vol. II, 124.

17 Sue Minter writes that in Miller, in his capacity as curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden and through his seed exchanges, ‘doubled the number of species in cultivation in Britain between 1731 and 1768’. For more on Miller, see Minter, The Apothecaries' Garden: A New History of Chelsea Physic Garden (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), 23-44.

18 William T. Stearn, ‘The Chelsea Physic Garden 1673-1973: Three Centuries of Triumph in Crises. A Tercentary Address’, Garden History 3, no. 2 (1975), 68-72.

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increased the ease with which any new plant might have become widely dispersed.19 The rosy

periwinkle also reportedly spread abroad as a result of its known medicinal qualities, for example

by sailors who chewed the leaves of the plant as a stimulant.20 A list of locations where the plant

is biologically naturalized indicates the extent to which such distribution eventually dramatically

shifted the plant’s global range.21 Today, it is found across Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America

and the Caribbean, the southern United States, and many Pacific and Indian Ocean Islands. This

process of biological naturalization, which occurred over the course of two centuries, resulted in

the plant being a weedy perennial in these tropical and subtropical locations.22

The description of the rosy periwinkle by Miller, subsequently repeated in his other

horticultural publications, indicates how and why it made its way into gardens – not only botanic

or physic gardens, but also those of individuals and enthusiasts – around the world. Although it

did in some places gain notice for its medicinal uses, especially in tropical regions where it

increasingly grew as a wild plant, it was celebrated elsewhere as an attractive ornamental

flower.23

In his instructions for the care and cultivation of the plant, Miller noted that it must be

19 Emma Spary’s analysis of the correspondence of Andre Thouin of Paris’ Jardin du Roi

provides a good example of the steadily increasing exchange of specimens among botanists and botanical centers in the late eighteenth century. See Spary, Utopia's Garden, ch. 2.

20 van der Heijden et al., ‘The Catharanthus Alkaloids’, 61. 21 In biology, naturalization refers to a specific and time-bound process of introduction and

acclimatization. According to one definition, ‘Naturalized species were brought to a place by human activity, either intentionally or not, and have subsequently established self-sustaining populations’. (From ‘Native and Naturalized Species’, in The Encyclopedia of Ecology and Environmental Management (Blackwell Science, 1998).)

22 It is unfortunately beyond the scope of this essay to chart this aspect of the history of the rosy periwinkle. More information about history and biology of the periwinkle, including information on its global extent can be found in M. A. van Bergen and W. Snoeijer, Revision of Catharanthus G. Don, Series of Revisions of Apocynaceae Xli, Wageningen Agricultural University Papers, 96-3 (Leiden: Wageningen Agricultural University, 1996), 35.

23 van der Heijden et al., ‘The Catharanthus Alkaloids’, 611-2.

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‘treated in the same way as other tender plants which are natives of warm countries’ and,

especially, taken in near the stove in cold weather to live in temperate heat, ‘without which they

will not live through the winter in England’.24 By stove, Miller meant a heated structure

constructed for the care of plants requiring warm temperatures either to germinate or to grow

year-round. The stove, or hothouse, was indispensable for the care of certain tropical plants in

many parts of Europe and North America, wherever winters were too cold or sunlight too uneven

for a traditional greenhouse to remain sufficiently warm.25 Miller concluded the entry with a

hearty endorsement of the plant: ‘This plant deserves a place in the stove, as much as any of the

exotick plants we have in England, because the flowers are very beautiful, and there is a constant

succession of them all the summer’.26 The rosy periwinkle was a plant for the privileged

cultivator to enjoy for its lovely flowers.

Thus even where it did not naturalize biologically, the rosy periwinkle thrived. The

immediate uptake of the plant in England as a pretty house- or stove-plant, as opposed to a

curative, is attested to in British advertisements and magazines of the late eighteenth century. For

example, the London seed and nursery outfit of Gordon, Dermer, and Thomson listed for sale in

their 1783 catalogue two varieties of Vinca rosea, both marked as plants ‘desirable in every

Collection’. One can assume that in this case the varieties, rosea and alba, were prized for their

attractive flowers. These are highlighted in the catalogue copy, which proclaims the variety alba

to be a Madagascar periwinkle ‘with most beautiful white spotted flowers’.27

24 Philip Miller, The Abridgement of the Gardener's Dictionary, 5th Edition (London, 1763),

865. 25 On the technologies of greenhouse and hothouse, see Tovah Martin, Once Upon a

Windowsill: A History of Indoor Plants (Portland, Oregon: Timber Press, 1988), 129-144. 26 Miller, The Abridgement of the Gardener's Dictionary, 865. 27 Dermer Gordon, and Thomson, Seed and Nurserymen, ‘A Catalogue of Trees, Shrubs,

Plants, Flower Roots, Seeds, &C’, (Mile End, London, 1783).

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Between its first description by de Flacourt and its appearance in gardening

advertisements, the natural history of the rosy periwinkle changed. Foremost among these shifts,

and most obvious, was the broadening of its distribution to include all corners of the globe.

Second was a divergence in its life cycle in different regions, at least as perceived by inhabitants

of these different places. In Madagascar, one assumes that the plant still maintained its traditional

uses and biological and ecological characteristics.28 For those living in tropical or subtropical

regions, the plant was established outdoors and left to grow wild, indeed to naturalize, as

perennial garden plant or a weedy shrub.29 And to upper class Londoners in the late eighteenth

century able to cultivate plants in a hothouse, whether for their own enjoyment or to show off to

friends, the rosy periwinkle was a tender exotic in need of particular care to keep it growing and

blooming from season to season. Where its biology prevented the rosy periwinkle from

becoming biologically naturalized, social and technological forces conspired to keep it alive as

an exotic.

A Tender Plant: ‘To do them justice, they should be sown in pots, and forwarded under

frames and glasses’

Although the goal of acclimatising tropical species to the European climate generated

considerable scientific interest in the importation and cultivation of new plant species, it was not

in Europe but in tropical and subtropical colonies around the globe that the rosy periwinkle

28 A group of conservationists and anthropologists working in Madagascar in the 1980s charted

continued traditional uses of the plant Tongue, also tangy. See Mark J. Plotkin, Ethnobotany in Madagascar: A Report on Conservation Priorities to IUCN/WWF (IUCN, 1985).

29 A. C. Plaizier, ‘A Revision of Catharanthus Roseus (L.) G. Don (Apocynaceae)’, Mededelingen Landbouwhogeschool Wageningen 81, no. 9 (1981), 1-2.

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successfully naturalized in any biological sense.30 By contrast, in places where the climate was

not suitable for biological naturalization, the plant experienced a different type of naturalization.

‘To naturalize’ also describes a cultural or social process – according to the Oxford English

Dictionary, it is ‘to make a thing native, common, or fitting; to put (something foreign) on a level

with what is native’.31 The history of the rosy periwinkle in American horticulture was

characterized by this process, which I call here cultural naturalization. The rosy periwinkle,

imported from Madagascar via European horticulturists, transformed from a tender exotic of the

hothouse into a backyard garden plant known for its hardiness.

By all accounts, American horticulture lagged significantly behind that in Europe.32

Widespread interest in gardening and plant collection did not emerge in the United States until

the mid-nineteenth century, and even then drew on the precedents set in Europe, both for the

plants under cultivation and the style of gardens constructed.33 Like their European counterparts,

early American gardeners were captivated by exotic plants.34

American gardening publications from the early nineteenth century, like the British texts

upon which they drew, considered the rosy periwinkle an exotic hothouse flower.35 Those

30 On acclimatisation, see Christopher Lever, They Dined on Eland: The Story of the

Acclimatisation Societies (London: Quiller Press, 1992). 31 ‘Naturalize’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2003 revision. 32 Tovah Martin, ‘Gardening under Glass’, in Keeping Eden: A History of Gardening in

America, ed. Walter T. Punch (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1992), 205-18 (see 210-11); U.P. Hedrick, A History of Horticulture in America to 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 149-150. See also Patricia Tice, Gardening in America, 1830-1910 (Rochester, N.Y.: Strong Museum, 1984).

33 Peggy Cornett Newcomb, ‘Plants of American Gardens’, in Keeping Eden, ed. Punch, 199-33 (see 119); Ann Leighton, American Gardens of the Nineteenth Century: ‘For Comfort and Affluence’ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 241-2.

34 Donald Zochert, ‘Science and the Common Man in Ante-Bellum America’, Isis 65, no. 4 (1974), 448-73 (see 456).

35 The historian Elizabeth Woodburn has complied a history of early American horticultural texts, and I use her research, as well as a similar compilation by U. P. Hedrick, as a reference

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wishing to include it among their plantings were instructed to start it from seed indoors during

the winter. In his 1806 American Gardener’s Calendar, the first of eleven editions of this

immensely popular and comprehensive ‘how-to garden’ book, the seed seller and nurseryman

Bernard M’Mahon listed Vinca rosea, the ‘Red Madagascar Periwinkle’ among the ‘hot-house

trees, shrubs, and succulent plants’. M’Mahon advised his more naïve readers not to think of

Vinca rosea as an annual for ‘though often flowering in the same season in which they were

sown, are not truly so, as they will continue for several years, if preserved in a hot-house; to do

them justice, they should be sown in pots and forwarded under frames and glasses’.36

Rosy periwinkles in cultivation in the United States at this time were likely few and far

between. The uncommonness of flower gardens alone would have limited demand for seeds of

an ornamental plant.37 In addition, expense and technological limitations made greenhouses and

hothouses uncommon in the United States at this time, even among the wealthy.38 Economics

and available technologies, much as they enabled cultivation of the rosy periwinkle in the United

States at all, were also the factors that constrained its spread.

The historian of American horticulture U. P. Hedrick speculated that M’Mahon’s

extensive list of exotic greenhouse and hothouse plants – numbering more than 1,500 – reflected

M’Mahon’s knowledge of the widespread cultivation of these plants among European florists

and plant collectors and not their use in the United States.39 This supposition is upheld in the case

of the rosy periwinkle by a survey of popular gardening literature appearing in the decades after

tool in locating the major works of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Elizabeth Woodburn, ‘American Horticultural Books’, in Keeping Eden, ed. Punch, 119-34; and Hedrick, A History of Horticulture, 467-98.

36 Bernard M'Mahon, The American Gardener's Calendar (Philadelphia, 1806), 388, 656. 37 Hedrick, A History of Horticulture, 146. 38 Ibid., 199. 39 Ibid.

15

M’Mahon’s American Gardener’s Calendar. Of three popular texts published in 1828 for the

purpose of informing the home gardener, none contain a description of Vinca rosea (as it was

still known).40 If these guides can be taken as an indication, in 1828 the rosy periwinkle was by

no means common in the United States.

The species nonetheless continued in cultivation, and over time it appeared with

increasing frequency in American gardening literature. One of the first notices of the plant found

in an American book subsequent to M’Mahon’s note is a mention in Thomas Bridgeman’s Young

Gardener’s Assistant. The 1850 edition of the book, which was aimed at both the commercial

grower and the home gardener, offered no description of the plant, only a listing under ‘Biennial

and Perennial Flowers’. It is marked as ‘tender and half hardy, will need protection in the

winter’.41 Changes over time in a contemporaneous publication, Robert Buist’s American Flower

Garden Directory, suggest the increasing use of the flower by gardeners. Although the first

edition of 1834, which like subsequent editions claimed to contain ‘practical directions for the

culture of plants, of the Hot-House, Garden-House, Flower-Garden, and Rooms or Parlours’,

does not mention Vinca rosea, in the 1845 edition it has a single-line listing under ‘choice

flowering annuals’, and by the sixth edition of 1854 it has a lengthy entry, with descriptions of

varieties and instructions for propagation and planting.42

This increase can be explained by two trends. The first was an expanding market for

flowers and horticultural products in general during this time period. Commercial horticulture

40 See Thomas Fessenden, The New American Gardener (Boston: J.B. Russell, 1828); William

Prince, A Short Treatise on Horticulture (New York, 1828); and Roland Green, Treatise on the Cultivation of Ornamental Flowers (Boston: J.B. Russell, 1828).

41 Thomas Bridgeman, The Young Gardener's Assistant, 8th ed. (New York, 1850), 149. 42 Robert Buist, The American Flower Garden Directory (Philadelphia: E.L. Carey & A. Hart,

1834), title page; Buist, American Flower Garden Directory, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1845), 27; Buist, American Flower-Garden Directory, New ed. (New York:

16

became prominent in the United States between 1830 and 1860.43 Many commercial enterprises

catering to a growing retail market would have had the technologies (hot-beds, hothouses, and

greenhouses) necessary for the propagation of exotic plants such as the rosy periwinkle.44 A

second explanation is the increasing use of the plant in outdoor gardens. Although only the

hothouse owner could cultivate the rosy periwinkle year round, others could nonetheless plant it

in the late spring and enjoy it as it flowered through the summer before succumbing to frost. In

the 1854 edition of American Flower Garden Directory, Buist’s entries for Vinca rosea indicated

that it was cultivated for these two distinct uses. The first mention of the plant – as a ‘choice

flowering annual’ – suggested that the best method of growing the rosy periwinkle for this

purpose was to begin it on a hot-bed, but assured the amateur gardener that ‘where this

convenience cannot be obtained, they will all succeed treated as hardy annuals [planted outdoors

later in the season without protection]’. This was followed by a second mention of Vinca rosea

in a discussion of hothouse plants.45

Garden manuals also indicate that the propagation of the rosy periwinkle was more

common among commercial growers than home gardeners. The works of Peter Henderson,

author of a series of floriculture books aimed at amateurs, professional or commercial growers,

give some indication of how different groups would have approached the same plant. Gardening

for Pleasure (1875), written ‘to make it such as would be useful to the occupant of a city lot, or

to the possessor of a few window plants, as well as to the owner of a country residence’, included

only a short mention of ‘Vinca’, a ‘known greenhouse plant’. Henderson directed the amateur

Orange Judd, 1854), 32, 176.

43 Hedrick, A History of Horticulture, 230. 44 The hot-bed was a garden bed, sometimes covered with glass, in which fermenting manure

was used to raise soil temperature therefore enabling the forcing of plants out of season. 45 Buist, American Flower-Garden Directory, 32, 176.

17

desiring further information about Vinca elsewhere: ‘For descriptions see catalogues of florists

and nurserymen’.46 In his 1887 book Practical Floriculture, written for both the amateur and the

professional, Henderson expanded on this entry somewhat, including ‘Vinca’ among a list of

plants that ‘can all be raised from seeds, and make fine plants for sale by the selling season in

May or June’.47 Henderson conceived of the rosy periwinkle as a plant that should be started by

professional florists in greenhouses and subsequently sold to ordinary gardeners for use in their

outdoor gardens.

Where the eighteenth century had witnessed the physical movement of the rosy

periwinkle from a very circumscribed to a global distribution, over the course of the nineteenth

century another shift in its physical location occurred within the United States. The rosy

periwinkle moved from its protected existence in the hothouse to the outdoor garden. Dual

entries for the plant such as Buist’s in 1854 reflected the beginnings of this shift in use. By the

late 1860s, mention of its use as a winter flowering plant had all but disappeared, whether

directed to the professional or amateur florist. For example, in 1866 Boston seed seller Joseph

Breck included Vinca rosea in his New Book of Flowers. Though he listed it as a ‘green-house

plant’, he also emphasized the ease with which it could be grown and transplanted outdoors:

‘These varieties… are easily propagated by cuttings under a glass. Young plants planted out in

June, will flower through the summer’.48 The emergence of commercial horticulture negated the

need for individual growers to own a greenhouse or other garden structures in order to grow the

rosy periwinkle. The home gardener need not experience the plant as anything other than a hardy

flowering summer annual. The first steps to naturalizing the exotic had been taken.

46 Peter Henderson, Gardening for Pleasure (New York: O. Judd Co., 1875), 7, 80. 47 Henderson, Practical Floriculture, New and enl. ed. (New York: O. Judd co., 1887), 118-

119.

18

The Old-Fashioned Periwinkle: ‘As much show with as little care’

The expansion of commercial horticulture and the ability to purchase the rosy periwinkle

for immediate planting made its cultivation considerably easier for many gardeners. As a result,

discourse about the plant changed. Between 1860 and 1930, the rosy periwinkle, still referred to

as Vinca rosea in gardening and horticultural texts, became commonplace. The plant’s

naturalization in American garden culture meant it was simply another option for adding border

colour or leafy greenery to a garden walk. Interest in the rosy periwinkle as a cheap, low-

maintenance, dependable bedding plant displaced interest in, or indeed awareness of, the plant as

a tender greenhouse beauty.

Improvements in horticultural technologies and the growth of commercial horticulture

alone do not account for the increasing appearance of the rosy periwinkle in American gardens.

Although these made it considerably easier for gardeners, whether they had access to a hothouse

or not, to grow the rosy periwinkle, the changing tastes in garden plants also contributed to its

increasing presence. In the late 1800s, home gardeners desired a different kind of flower than

they did at the start of the century – and this was different too from those that they would covet

shortly after its end. Whereas earlier, naturalistic-style gardens favoured almost any type of

plant, the highly shaped and geometric gardens that became fashionable mid-century required

‘bedding plants’, low-growing leafy shrubs or highly coloured and densely blooming flowering

plants. Gardeners planted these in long, thick, orderly rows of contrasting colours, or in large

clusters according to a specific pattern.49

With its continuous flowering and proliferation of blooms, the biology of the rosy

48 Joseph Breck, New Book of Flowers (New York: O. Judd & company, 1866), 384.

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periwinkle meant it was well suited for this garden use. By the end of the nineteenth century,

bedding was its typical use described in horticultural literature. ‘Highly ornamental… very

useful for bedding or pot culture’, described seed seller Frank S. Platt in 1895.50 L. H. Bailey’s

Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, a massive reference work published between 1900 and

1902, lists Vinca rosea, a ‘tender plant of erect habit which is used mostly for summer bedding’.

According to the Cyclopedia, the plant’s chief recommendations were its inexpensiveness and

ease of cultivation. It ‘can be grown in large masses for public parks with somewhat less expense

than geraniums’ Bailey noted.51 In his 1906 Florist’s Manual, a reference book for commercial

florists, William Scott wrote, ‘Vinca rosea… requires a warm house in winter. It makes a pretty

greenhouse plant, but its chief use in is the flower garden, where it makes a very pretty bed’.52

As the plant became increasingly common and the challenges of its cultivation less

apparent to growers, discourse about the plant shifted. For one, the exotic origins of the plant

became lost or confused. Bailey’s 1900 Cyclopedia misidentified the origins of the flower,

claiming that although referred to as the Madagascar Periwinkle, it ‘is probably not native to the

Old World’.53 The 1885 Illustrated Dictionary listed the plant as native to South Florida and the

tropics in general.54 Platt, a seed seller from New Haven, Connecticut, listed Vinca rosea among

his ‘Choice Collection of American, French, and German Flower Seeds’ in his 1895 catalogue,

49 Leighton, American Gardens of the Nineteenth Century, 241. 50 Frank S. Platt, Frank S. Platt Seeds, Annual Descriptive Catalog (New Haven, Conn.: 1895),

87. 51 L. H. Bailey and Wilhelm Miller, Cyclopedia of American Horticulture (New York: The

Macmillan Company, 1900), v. 4, 1933. 52 William Scott, The Florists' Manual, 2d ed. (Chicago: Florists' Pub. Co., 1906), 231. 53 Bailey and Miller, Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, vol. 4, 1935. 54 George Nicholson, James W. H. Trail, and John Garrett, The Illustrated Dictionary of

Gardening: A Practical and Scientific Encyclopædia of Horticulture for Gardners and Botanists, vol. IV, 160.

20

with no indication at all of its prior history.55 After a century of propagation and the adaptation of

gardeners to the plant’s needs, the rosy periwinkle could hardly be considered exotic.

In fact, the flower was increasingly seen as mundane. It appeared commonly enough in

gardens that it was recognized to have an American past, even though its history in Madagascar

was lost. The 1932 seed catalogue of George J. Ball Co., operating out of Chicago, listed Vinca

rosea as ‘a fine old-fashioned bedding plant’.56 Six years later, the Ball Company description

slightly expanded but still emphasized familiarity and dependability: ‘Few of the plants in our

ground trial give as much show with as little care as the old-fashioned periwinkles…One of the

few annual bedding plants that can be depended upon to give general satisfaction’.57 Likewise, a

Washington Post article of 1936 described the plant as ‘one of “grandmother’s favorites”’.58

With increasing mundaneness came a declining sense of its attractiveness in comparison

to other available plants. Fritz Bahr’s Commercial Floriculture, published in 1922 as a guide for

professional growers, recommended Vinca rosea for a formal bedding flower that would bloom

for the length of the summer. Yet Bahr instructed the florist not to expect anything spectacular:

‘The individual flowers don’t amount to much, but there are so many of them on each plant that

they make up for it’.59 In a similar vein, the 1936 Washington Post article declared Vinca rosea’s

usefulness not as a flowering plant but as a cheap leafy border shrub.60 The contrast to the

earliest mentions of the plant in horticultural literature, which made much of its attractive

flowers, is sharp.

55 Frank S. Platt Seeds, Annual Descriptive Catalog (New Haven, Conn.: 1895). 56 George J. Ball Seed Co., West Chicago, Ill., Catalog No. 21 (July-December 1932). 57 George J. Ball Seed Co., West Chicago, Ill., Catalog No. 32 (January-June 1938). 58 ‘The Periwinkle in Come-Back on Its Merits’, Washington Post, 29 March 1936. 59 Fritz Bahr, Fritz Bahr's Commercial Floriculture; a Practical Manual for the Retail Grower

(New York: A.T. De la Mare Co., 1922), 549-550. 60 ‘The Periwinkle in Come-Back on Its Merits’.

21

The increasingly doleful – or at least unenthusiastic – evaluations of the plant did not

correspond to a diminished presence of the plant in commercial garden literature. On the

contrary, the rosy periwinkle only began to appear consistently in the catalogues of major seed

companies beginning in the early 1930s. A survey of the catalogues of two large wholesale seed

companies, Ball Seed of West Chicago, Illinois, and Park Seed of Greensboro, South Carolina,

between 1930 and 1995 showed continuous marketing of the plant. The prominence of the plant

in these catalogues and the number of varieties offered for sale increased each decade.61 In

comparison to tropical and subtropical locations, where the rosy periwinkle became biologically

naturalized, it experienced a different type of naturalization in American garden culture. The

plant that had once been touted as an exotic no longer could be distinguished as such from other

American ornamental plants. It was readily available, easy to care for, and met demand for a

leafy and ever-blooming bedding plant.

An Exoticized Native: ‘Sahara Madness’

The changing place of the rosy periwinkle in American culture did not stop at this

naturalization. During the second half of the twentieth century, the pull of the exotic appeared

again, drawing both the discourse about and the biology of the rosy periwinkle away from native

and naturalized. As mentioned, beginning in the early 1980s, the conservation community and

other activist groups sought to display the plant species as endangered, which meant putting

aside the history of its biological naturalization around the globe. Such imagery was driven by a

new focus among conservationists on the importance of global biodiversity and concerns about

61 This assessment is based on catalogues from the George J. Ball Seed Co, West Chicago,

Illinois, and George W. Park and Co., Greenwood, South Carolina published between approximately 1930 and 1992.

22

its disappearance. Advertising campaigns such as that of the World Wildlife Fund sought to draw

attention and resources from developed countries toward species-rich but otherwise poor

countries – to those exotic locations where biodiversity appeared to be most threatened.62 Yet

even before this, the horticultural community had also sought to counter cultural naturalization of

the increasingly ordinary rosy periwinkle, though for reasons of commerce and not conservation.

Plant breeders focused on creating biological innovations that would distinguish new strains of

the plants, while marketing by commercial horticulture operations brought these differences to

the public via exoticized names.

American horticulturists had engaged in plant ‘improvement’, meaning primarily

selection and hybridization of species, from the mid-eighteenth century; for the most part,

however, these efforts focused on species of agricultural importance.63 Not until the emergence

of a consumer market for garden plants in the mid-nineteenth century, and the increasing

popularity of gardening among all social classes, did the rewards to innovation in flowers and

non-agricultural garden species grow large enough to encourage commercial horticultural

breeding in the United States.64

New varieties of the rosy periwinkle did not appear until long after this initial surge in

62 For a critical assessment of these conservation activities, which includes mention of the

WWF campaign concerning Madagascar, see Ramachandra Guha, How Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006), ch. 5.

63 Tice, Gardening in America, 56; U. P. Hedrick’s analysis confirms the secondary importance of flower cultivation. See Hedrick, A History of Horticulture, ch. 16. European obsession with garden fashions dates to a much earlier time period and, consequently, more plant varieties were available from European sources and at a much earlier time. See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 233.

64 Tice, Gardening in America, 57-59. On the advent of commercial agriculture in the Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century, see Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, For Shade and for Comfort: Democratizing Horticulture in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest (West Lafayette, Ind.:

23

floricultural innovations for a large consumer market. Only after 1935 did seed companies

succeed in bringing new varieties to the commercial market, producing forms and colours that

the plant had never displayed in the rainforest of Madagascar. The Ball Seed Company offered

only two varieties of Vinca rosea in 1931, similar in description to the two forms described

centuries earlier by de Flacourt. In 1932 they added a soft pink variety, and in 1934 the entirely

white Alba pura. A decade later they offered two additional varieties.65 By 1970, however, the

list had grown quite lengthy, including most of the above varieties, as well as new cultivars

identified by names such as Dwarf, Snowflakes, Little Pinkie, Polka Dot, and others. By the

early 1990s, the catalogue listed over twenty varieties, and the number of varieties offered by the

Park Seed Company over the same time period followed a similar trend.66 In the early twenty-

first century, there were over 100 named cultivated varieties of the rosy periwinkle.67

This biological retooling of the rosy periwinkle emphasized changes that followed garden

trends. Early innovations characterized plants of a smaller, tamed habit as preferable to the old

standby, especially for use in bedded gardens. For example, the 1956 introduction of the variety

Coquette claimed it to be ‘a dwarf type of Vinca for which we have been looking the past several

years’. Its small and uniform size rendered it ideal for bedding.68 In the 1980s and 1990s, the

search for a more colourful rosy periwinkle exceeded interest in all other traits. Since the first

mention of the plant by de Flacourt, the rosy periwinkle had been known to produce blooms of

only three colours, white, white with a rose eye, and a rosy-purple, with some variability in the

Purdue University Press, 2004), esp. ch. 4 and 5.

65 George J. Ball Seed Co., West Chicago, Ill., Catalogs No. 18 (January-June 1931), No. 21 (July-December 1932), No. 24 (Jan-Jun 1934), No. 46 (January 1943), and No. 88 (Spring 1970).

66 Ball Seed Co., West Chicago, Ill., 1991-1992 Catalog. 67 van der Heijden, ‘The Catharanthus Alkaloids’, 612. 68 George J. Ball Co., West Chicago, Ill., Catalog No. 72 (Spring 1956).

24

shades of these. A press release of the National Garden Bureau detailing the history of ‘Vinca’

placed this narrow colour range ahead of other grower challenges. ‘Through the 1980's’, the

Bureau reported, ‘popularity of vinca as a bedding plant was limited because commercial

varieties had limited color range: pure pink, rose, white and white with red eye and also poor

germination’.69 The horticulturist Ronald Parker of the University of Connecticut was rumoured

to have spent fourteen years developing a variety of the plant that would have more colourful

blooms. He succeeded in doing so in the late 1980s, by crossing the rosy periwinkle with other

species of its genus, and several of the varieties he developed won major gardening awards in

1990s.70

These biological innovations were accompanied by a discourse of novelty. One industry

magazine emphasized the unusual shades of the variety Pretty in Pink, ‘the first true pink vinca’,

and hailed the ‘deep-violet rose, a unique color in vinca’ of the variety Pretty in Rose.71 Another

industry publication called the development of these varieties ‘a significant color breeding

breakthrough’ and their hue a ‘revolutionary new color’.72 Many, though certainly not all, of the

new varieties named by plant breeders and seed companies call to mind a transplanted exotic:

Madagascar Pink, Pacifica Punch, Sahara Madness Bright Eye, Sahara White, and Tropicana

Blush, among others.73

The demands of a competitive market in flowering plants drove the culturally naturalized

species into new and exotic forms. Of course, biological novelty and human ingenuity accounted

69 National Garden Bureau, ‘2002: Year of the Vinca,’

http://www.ngb.org/year_of/index.cfm?YOID=7. Accessed 11 May 2011. 70 Winerup, ‘At Play in the Fields of Vinca’. 71 ‘Vinca’, Greenhouse Manager 9, no. 3 (July 1990): 84. 72 ‘Looking for Quality? 1991 AAS Winners Offer Superior Landscape and Garden

Performance’, Grower Talks 54, no. 2 (June 1990): 48-50. 73 For a full list of varieties as of December 1996, see Bergen and Snoeijer, Revision of

25

for only part of the rosy periwinkle’s extreme marketability. One trait, which never failed to

appear in catalogue copy, contributed to this popularity: the plant’s ability to survive in a hot and

dry environment. Comments ranged from a catalogue's claim in 1937 that ‘Our planting of Vinca

this summer in our outdoor trials made an exceptionally fine showing throughout the extremely

hot, dry weather that literally burned other stock up’74 to the 1986 catalogue approbation that

‘Vinca grows and flowers even when subjected to conditions of extreme heat and high

pollution’.75 Where colour and size resulted from intense selection and hybridization, tolerance

for heat had characterized the biology of the plant since its first flowering in the forests of

Madagascar.

A 1992 advertisement for the variety ‘Tropicana’ summed up both the demands of

contemporary garden consumers and the traits of the modern, garden-variety rosy periwinkle

quite well. For the gardeners in search of ‘intense colours that will thrive in hot conditions’,

Tropicanas ‘offer the Color Advantage you’ve been waiting for. They also combine earliness,

flower size, floriferousness and vigorous growth in one package’. These traits combined to make

Tropicana ‘the ultimate Vinca’.76 And the biological characteristics of the rosy periwinkle

specimen available at garden shops at the close of the twentieth century suggested that it did

indeed meet these needs, as a result of its history in the rainforest of Madagascar and the

changing tastes and technologies of European and American horticulturists. Both enabled the

plant to become and continue as a common feature of the American garden. (See figure 3.)

Today, the plant is indeed a native. How could something easily obtained and still more easily

cultivated be otherwise? As a New York Times reporter noted in 1992, ‘It is not that the vinca is

Catharanthus G. Don.

74 George J. Ball Co., West Chicago, Ill., Catalog No. 30 (January-July 1937). 75 Ball Seed, West Chicago, Ill. Catalog (1986).

26

exotic’. What then is it? ‘A colorful flowering annual that is perfect for your typical idiot

suburban gardener’.77

Conclusion: ‘For dressing up the center of asphalt jungles’

Where some conservationists in the 1980s and 90s pitched the rosy periwinkle as the

delicate, threatened star of the tropical rainforest, gardeners had a different take. For these

growers, Catharanthus roseus brought a completely different jungle environment to mind.

‘Vincas will survive and thrive… where other plants would languish – at foundations of houses

on south and west-facing exposures, or balconies of high rises, next to driveways with reflected

heat and other problem locations’, claimed one company. ‘Resistance to heat, disease, insects,

and air pollution make vinca ideal candidates for dressing up the center of asphalt jungles’.78

Where gentlemen growers at the turn of the eighteenth century wrote about the tender exotic to

be lavished with attention in a hothouse, modern growers note that Catharanthus roseus is

‘Highly recommended for low-maintenance landscaping, including industrial and municipal

grounds’.79 And where growers at mid-century seemed to think the rosy periwinkle old-

fashioned, horticultural science had remade it by century’s end, so that its naturalized presence

could be revitalized via an human-made exoticism.

This history raises two issues relevant to environmental history. First, it points to the need

to consider how the flexibility of the concepts ‘exotic’ and ‘naturalized’ have contributed in

varying ways to the evaluation of landscapes both close to home and far afield. A handful of

scholars have considered the history of how conservation has been ‘marketed’, and some have

76 Waller Flowerseed Company, Advertisement, Grower Talks 57, no. 3 (1993), 68. 77 Winerup, ‘At Play in the Fields of Vinca’. 78 ‘Tough, but Oh-So-Pretty’, in Gardens, Flyer of the Ball Seed Company, 1983.

27

examined the imagery deployed to convince the public of the imperative for conservation.80

However, this work to date has not closely examined the relationship between changing physical

landscapes and the images deployed of them. The late twentieth century witnessed the

convergence of both environmental groups and horticulturists in emphasizing the exoticness of a

particular species to further their goals: on the one hand, to emphasize the urgency of rainforest

conservation, and on the other, to manipulate its biology so as to create unusual new forms of an

ordinary plant for the home gardener. In both cases, the renewed emphasis on the exotic

counteracted the species’ evident success at proliferating in both wild and domesticated

landscapes. The extent to which the rosy periwinkle had naturalized (biologically and culturally)

diminished its perceived value – and also threatened to alter the value of the landscapes that it

occupied – among members of both groups.

Second, the flexibility of these categories of exotic and natural in our cultural

imagination, particularly in the range of traits to which they can be applied, seems to be mirrored

equally by the flexible, adaptive biology of the species at hand, by its evolution in response to

human ideas and actions. This example of evolutionary history should prompt us to consider not

only the historical motivations behind and implications of our categorizations but also the ways

in which they operate irrespective of the biological entity they describe. The rosy periwinkle has

not been a static entity, but rather an organism with sufficient plasticity to respond to the various

environments provided for it over the course of recent human history – environments in part

79 Park Seed Wholesale, Catalog, 1990-1991. 80 These include, for example: on celebrity and conservation, Dan Brockington, Celebrity and

the Environment (London: Zed Books, 2009); on the uses of images in American environmentalism, Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); on the uses of media by environmentalists, see Libby Lester, Media and Environment: Conflict, Politics and the News (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010), esp. ch. 6.

28

determined by humans ideas about the species and why it might be valuable.81

Were this study also to consider the history of cultivation of the rosy periwinkle for

pharmaceutical development, this demonstration might extend still further. For example, the

presence in the plants of the very alkaloids that rendered them valuable to pharmaceutical

companies was discovered to decrease significantly under cultivation in North America when

this was first attempted.82 The resistance of the periwinkle to this instance of domestication,

combined with high demand for the alkaloids, forced Eli Lilly – the commercial producer of the

chemotherapeutics derived from the periwinkle – to continually look abroad in their production

of drug. Lilly pursued both wild-gathering and plantation-style production in many tropical

locations for the supply of plants it required; however, rosy periwinkles from Madagascar (its

southern coastal region in particular) were known to yield the highest quantities of active

compounds of those grown around the world and so this continued to be the most ecologically

favourable site for production.83 In Madagascar, plantation production has always been

accompanied by harvesting ‘wild’ plants from the forests, many of which were considered by the

late 1980s and early 1990s highly threatened ecosystems.84

The cultivation and collection of the rosy periwinkle, carried out in a landscape

81 A recent study that arrives at a similar conclusion in regards to another set of plant species is

Brett M. Bennett, ‘A Global History of Australian Trees’, Journal of the History of Biology 44, no. 1 (2001): 125-45.

82 Sheldon et al., Medicinal Plants, 14-15. 83 It was not otherwise the most favourable, due to political and social unrest. A detailed

account of the cultivation and collection of the periwinkle for pharmaceutical use is found in Benjamin David Neimark, ‘Industrial Heartlands of Nature: The Political Economy of Biological Prospecting in Madagascar’, (Ph.D. diss, Rutgers University, 2009), ch. 3. Eli Lilly was only able to sustain its U.S. production of the drug for a brief period in the 1970s (see Neimark, ‘Industrial Heartlands’, 83-4).

84 See, for example, brief discussion and further sources in Jorg U. Ganzhorn et al., ‘The Biodiversity of Madagascar: One of the World’s Hottest Hotspots on Its Way Out’, Oryx 35, no. 4 (October 2001): 346-8.

29

understood to be both exotic and endangered, eventually provided North American

conservationists with the material for their own campaigns. The threatened forests of

Madagascar were indeed critical sources of the plant in spite of its global spread. For the

purposes of this paper, this also provides a further example of how awareness of the evolutionary

history of the rosy periwinkle, its organismal plasticity, is crucial to understanding its place in

human history – in this case its symbolic function as an endangered exotic species.

Figure 1. The rosy periwinkle featured in the 1980s World Wildlife Fund campaign, “Save the Plants that Save Us.” Image used with permission of the World Wildlife Fund, United States. Figure 2. ‘Vinca,’ one of the novel exotic flowers illustrated in Philip Miller’s Figures of the Most Beautiful, Useful, and Uncommon Plants (1760). Image courtesy of Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. Figure 3. Catharanthus roseus for sale at Ace Hardware and Nursery (Kula, Hawaii). Photograph by Forest and Kim Starr, used by permission under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.