After the Irish Parliament
in 1790 appropriated funds to the Dublin Society for the
founding of a public garden, one was established on 48 acres
(19.5 hectares) of Glasnevin floodplain between the River
Tolka and what later became the Prospect Cemetery (124
acres/50 hectares). The mission of the gardens was, and is, to
promote horticultural knowledge useful to agriculture,
medicine, and industry and to provide visitors access to sites
of tranquil beauty—admission is free even today. In addition
to many thousands of living species, millions of dried
specimens are stored on site. During the famine years of the 1840s,
researchers at the Botanic Gardens identified the fungus
responsible for the potato blight and labored to arrest its
progress.
The grounds feature a number of architecturally striking
Victorian greenhouses. When Bloom thinks of the "Hothouse," he
probably is recalling a visit to the Great Palm House, a white
iron-and-glass structure built to house plants collected from
warm regions of the Empire. Constructed in 1883 after a
violent storm damaged an earlier wooden version, the new
building was designed by Richard Turner, a Dublin-born iron
founder who had already built the Curvilinear Range of
glasshouses in the Botanic Gardens, as well as similar grand
structures in Belfast and the Kew Gardens outside of London.
The Palm House contains tropical and subtropical species large
and small, and an adjacent building houses hundreds of
varieties of orchids. In an excellent evocation of the
experience of walking through such greenhouses Bloom thinks, "Sensitive
plants. Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping
sickness in the air."
"Sensitive plants" suggests how vulnerable tropical
plants are to a northern climate, but it may also refer to one
particular plant, the Mimosa pudica. This plant, which
is native to tropical regions in Asia and the Americas, has
leaves that close up along their central midrib when touched
and unfold again a few minutes later. The phrase may also
possibly refer to "The Sensitive Plant," a poem by Percy
Bysshe Shelley, a supposition strengthened by the fact that "Flowers of idleness," four
sentences earlier, appears to recall the title of a book of
Byron's poems, Hours of Idleness.
Bloom may also be aware of another Botanic Gardens facility
in County Wicklow. In Eumaeus he expresses a desire
to escape "the grind of city life in the summertime for choice
when dame Nature is at her spectacular best constituting
nothing short of a new lease of life. There were equally
excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home island,
delightful sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering a plethora
of attractions as well as a bracing tonic for the system in
and around Dublin and its picturesque environs even,
Poulaphouca to which there was a steamtram, but also farther
away from the madding crowd in Wicklow, rightly
termed the garden of Ireland." The Botanic Gardens
manages a second facility at Kilmacurragh, about 40 miles
south of Dublin, where a milder winter climate and more acidic
soil permit outdoor cultivation of a wider range of plants.
The arboretum and gardens there, on 52 acres surrounding a
Queen Anne-style house (now derelict), were established in
1712 and expanded in the 19th century through association with
the Botanic Gardens. In addition to this national treasure,
County Wicklow has magnificent country estate gardens at Mount
Usher (laid out in 1868), Powerscourt (likewise mostly late
19th century), and Kilruddery House near Bray Head (mostly designed in
the late 17th century).
Standing in the lushly planted and well-tended Prospect
cemetery in Hades, Bloom thinks that it and the
Protestant cemetery in Harold's Cross deserve to be called
gardens: "And very neat he keeps it too: trim grass and
edgings. His garden Major Gamble calls Mount Jerome. Well,
so it is. Ought to be flowers of sleep. Chinese
cemeteries with giant poppies growing produce the best opium
Mastiansky told me. The Botanic Gardens are just over
there. It's the blood sinking in the earth gives new life."
Bloom seems to have very little gardening experience, but he
likes to consider the kinds of nutrients that plants would
appreciate. At the end of Calypso his thoughts center
on excrement. In the passage just cited from Hades
they turn more macabre. Channeling Jonathan Swift, he
whimsically ponders the possibilities for marketing human
flesh as compost: "Well preserved fat corpse, gentleman,
epicure, invaluable for fruit garden. A bargain. By carcass of
William Wilkinson, auditor and accountant, lately deceased,
three pounds thirteen and six. With thanks." As an "epicure,"
Mr. Wilkinson will himself have been well supplied with
nutrients, so the plants are bound to respond well to his
remains.
Bloom's fantasies of lush gardens reach their apogee in Ithaca,
when he imagines coming into possession of a rich country
estate. The property will be called "Flowerville," and its
grounds will contain "a shrubbery, a glass summerhouse with
tropical palms, equipped in the best botanical manner, a
rockery with waterspray, a beehive arranged on humane
principles, oval flowerbeds in rectangular
grassplots set with eccentric ellipses of scarlet and chrome
tulips, blue scillas, crocuses, polyanthus, sweet William,
sweet pea, lily of the valley (bulbs obtainable from sir
James W. Mackey (Limited) wholesale and retail seed and bulb
merchants and nurserymen, agents for chemical manures, 23
Sackville street, upper), an orchard, kitchen garden and
vinery, protected against illegal trespassers by glasstopped
mural enclosures, a lumbershed with padlock for various
inventoried implements." In time, Bloom thinks, he may add "A
rabbitry and fowlrun, a dovecote, a botanical
conservatory, 2 hammocks (lady’s and gentleman’s), a
sundial shaded and sheltered by laburnum or lilac trees, an
exotically harmonically accorded Japanese tinkle gatebell
affixed to left lateral gatepost, a capacious waterbutt, a
lawnmower with side delivery and grassbox, a lawnsprinkler
with hydraulic hose."
Various features of this fantasy seem to have been inspired
by visits to the Botanical Gardens. The "glass summerhouse
with tropical palms, equipped in the best botanical manner"
certainly recalls the Palm House, and the "botanical
conservatory" alludes to the scientific facilities
encyclopedically stocked with specimens. The grounds of the
Botanic Gardens have probably inspired many of his outdoor
plantings as well. Features as diverse as "a rockery" and
geometrically arranged flowerbeds can be found there, and,
according to a Catalogue of Plants in the Dublin Society's
Botanic Garden, at Glasnevin (1802), the plantings
include all of the flowers mentioned in Ithaca:
tulips, scillas, crocuses, polyanthus, sweet William, sweet
pea, and lily of the valley.
Asking itself whether Bloom of 7 Eccles Street could foresee
Bloom of Flowerville, Ithaca's narrative answers its
question with a picture worthy of a clothing catalogue: "In
loose allwool garments with Harris tweed cap, price 8/6, and
useful garden boots with elastic gussets and wateringcan,
planting aligned young firtrees, syringing, pruning, staking,
sowing hayseed, trundling a weedladen wheelbarrow
without excessive fatigue at sunset amid the scent of
newmown hay, ameliorating the soil, multiplying wisdom,
achieving longevity."
The novel makes at least one more tacit reference to the
Botanic Gardens in Circe when Mrs. Bellingham
testifies against Bloom. In addition to his heinous sexual
crimes, even Bloom's tender romantic overtures have, upon
scientific inspection, proved to be damnably false:
"Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the
heights, as he said, in my honour. I had it examined by a
botanical expert and elicited the information that it
was a blossom of the homegrown potato plant purloined from a
forcingcase of the model farm."
Allusions gloriously intertwine here. Edelweiss is a
short-blooming flower found sparsely scattered on steep, rocky
alpine slopes. The devoted Bloom has purportedly traveled
abroad and trudged to some rugged, icy peak to bring back a
"bloom" of this exotic plant for his dearly beloved. (Folk
traditions in the Alps prescribe exactly such shows of
devotion.) But his beloved, motivated by deep distrust and
perhaps aided by her aristocratic people's connections in the
Castle, has taken the
flower to be examined by a government-salaried scientist at
the Botanical Gardens, and that "expert," possessing a deep
familiarity with the "homegrown potato plant" by virtue of his
facility's work on the fungal blight, has instantly spotted
the fraud. Moreover, the scientist has somehow determined that
this particular potato flower was stolen from a tray of
specimens on a "model farm," presumably the one "at Kinnereth on the lakeshore
of Tiberias" that Bloom has read about in Calypso.
Once more, then, Leopold Bloom has been exposed as a
shameless and total fraud. His purported knowledge of matters
horticultural (not to mention his capacity for romantic
tenderness) is as baseless as his social respectability, his
literary authorship, his service in Her Majesty's armed
forces, his messianic wisdom, his Christianity, his kindness
to animals, and all other virtues which unprincipled defenders
can think to enumerate.
