Resurrecting Natures with Charlotte Smith and Ebony G. Patterson

Recent scholarship on the botanically influenced poetry of the early Romantic period, particularly that of Charlotte Smith, has emphasized the genre’s formal engagement with the herbarium, treating botanical poetry as a non-extractive alternative to the violence of specimen collection. Yet such readings isolate the act of specimen collection and poetic return from the larger systems of extraction, translocation, and violence in which they participate. In this article, I read Smith’s Beachy Head alongside Ebony G. Patterson’s recent installation at the New York Botanical Garden, which artistically resurrected extinct species from herbarium specimens and “planted” them among living flora, in order to attend to the historical and geographic displacements recorded in and created through herbarium sheets, and the related questions of belonging when return is impossible. By looking at the gaps between these two representations of mobility and loss, I illuminate an otherwise obscured strand of Romantic thinking about haunted natures.