Transimperial botany and the error of its ways: the bitter ‘reality’ of fungal disease in Miles Joseph Berkeley’s ‘Vegetable Pathology’, 1854–1857

Abstract The beginnings of Western plant pathology were shaped largely by nineteenth-century naturalists’ encounters with phytopathological fungi. This reading of Miles Joseph Berkeley’s series on ‘Vegetable Pathology’ in The Gardeners’ Chronicle, one of the discipline’s founding texts, argues that the fungal epidemics of the 1800s led mycologists to seriously question certain key strategies of transimperial botany, including plantation monoculture, plant transfers, fertilization, and breeding—in short, white humans’ ability to control plant processes. Even as Berkeley argued tirelessly that pathogens were involved in disease, he emphasized that plant-pathogenic fungi thrived due to man-made changes in plants and their environments. Equipped with detailed knowledge of the life cycles of fungi and the related diseases, Berkeley argued, botanists would be able to identify the material circumstances favouring fungal development, detailed accounts of which could be found elsewhere in the journal and were frequently referenced in the ‘Vegetable Pathology’. Two case studies recontextualize Berkeley’s descriptions of individual fungi within the Chronicle’s wider coverage, demonstrating the wealth of information available to readers who wished to consider the circumstances of fungal disease, and throwing some light on how the series’ uncomfortable suggestions were received by adherents of economic botany.