The Ashmolean’s beautiful new temporary exhibition explores some of the ways in which we relate to flowers: aesthetically, scientifically and economically. The subtitle, ‘How Plants Changed Our World’, might suggest an emphasis on plants such as potatoes and sugar cane, or on how Arab agronomists adapted Indian vegetables to the Mediterranean. In fact, we start with the European project of ‘collecting the world’, which began in the Renaissance.

The curators, Francesca Leoni and Shailendra Bhandare, have been inspired by the extraordinary wealth of material in Oxford. The collections of John Tradescant the Elder and the Younger, pioneering botanical explorers and ‘gardiners to the ROSE and LILY QUEEN’, are among the earliest holdings in the Ashmolean itself. The Oxford Botanic Garden is the oldest ‘physic garden’ in Britain still on its original site. William Sherard, botanist and diplomat, endowed a chair of botany at the university in 1734 and awarded it to Johann Jacob Dillenius, who was at the centre of a vast European network of savants. Sherard also inaugurated an outstanding botanical library, while his brother James amassed a remarkable collection of rare plants at his garden in Eltham which Dillenius catalogued in a sumptuous volume with hand-coloured plates, Hortus Elthamensis (1732), on view here. The exhibition draws on this magnificent collection of botanical rarities, augmented by loans from Kew.

The display opens with the Tradescants and the culture of collecting in 17th-century England. The first John Tradescant was gardener to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, at Hatfield House, from where he was sent off to Europe to buy trees and shrubs. The English elite had developed a passion