Anna may have been the Anne Buckett baptised in May 1643 in Middlesex, or the Ann Becket baptised in December 1644 in Surrey, though neither is certain. Like other daughters of merchants or gentlemen learning the gentler arts, she stitched both gardens she saw and those she imagined. Needlework creations of the time swarmed with peacocks, parrots, lions, leopards and sunflowers from foreign lands.

Voyages to North America, the Caribbean, Africa and India sent waves of plants rippling back across the sea

In the 17th century, voyages to new colonies in North America, the Caribbean, Africa and India turned plants like tobacco and sugarcane into profits. They also sent waves of plants rippling back across the sea. For women at home, gardens made the wider world a material reality.

Dainties for a queen

In 1629, John Parkinson, royal herbalist to Charles I, dedicated his new book of flowers, Paradisi in Sole, to the king’s wife, 20-year-old French-born Henrietta Maria. “Knowing your maiestie so much delighted with all the faire flowers of a garden,” the work “seemed as it were destined, to bee first offered into your highnesse hands.”

The more exotic and ‘outlandish’ a flower, the more fashionable. The potatoes of Canada with their small yellow blooms, wrote Parkinson, were once stewed with butter and wine as “dainties for a queene”. But by 1629 these were “growne to be so common here with us at London, that even the most vulgar begin to despise them”.

Paradisi in Sole was a gateway to further knowledge for ‘gentlewomen’, and Parkinson urged such women to look, smell and taste in their own domestic gardens. The crown imperial from Constantinople “doe smell somewhat strong as it were the savour of a Foxe”. Tulip bulbs tasted like “sweete onions”. The West Indian “daffodil with a red flower” was “by the Indians in their tongue named Azcal Xochitl”.

Flowers introduced new smellscapes as well as sights. The scent of orange flowers – originally grown in China – in perfumed waters was favoured by ladies and queens, even if the orange fruit could be sold in playhouses by girls of dubious reputation. In a Dutch still life painting by Pieter Claesz dated 1627, a dead turkey baked into a pie clutches a sprig of orange blossom in its beak. On a table set with Chinese porcelain, a Pacific nautilus shell and Indian spices, the blossom is just one of many exotica.

Sweet-smelling nasturtiums from the West Indies decked small bunches that a woman might present to a friend or receive from a lover. Blooms like jasmine, orange blossom and the delicate white flowers of the Mexican tuberose perfumed women from princesses to sex workers.

A satire on a lady’s dressing room by Mary Evelyn in 1690 described gloves scented with such fragrances. In the poem Pendragon, or, The Carpet Knight his Kalendar (1698), the knight follows Selena to church, only to be overwhelmed by “a whiff of tuberose” emanating from “her skin or clothes”. A scent bottle from the Cheapside hoard of Elizabethan and Stuart jewels, found in London in 1912, is encrusted with enamel, gold and gems. Other bottles engraved with oriental-style birds and plants attested to the value of the smells they contained.

Like Anna’s pineapple, flowers were sources of artistic inspiration and invited readers to picture foreign places. Elizabeth, Countess of Carnarvon, holds her own painting of a tulip, also known as a ‘Turk’s cap’, in a portrait with her sister Mary Capel, later Duchess of Beaufort.

For Mary, flowers were a scientific passion. Plants put her in touch with botanists like Hans Sloane and opened her mind to places she could only read of: the West Indies, China, Japan and Ceylon. Mary kept books of the plants she grew and collected, along with notes including their indigenous names. Among her pressed flowers at the Natural History Museum is a desiccated South American passionfruit “ripen’d at Fairford in Gloucestershire”.

As a woman, Mary could not join the Royal Society, the premier organisation for the study of natural history, nor publish work in her name. Yet, in the century of her death it was reported that she was responsible for the introduction of 87 new plants, among them Virginian blush flowered speedwell and Persian bell flowered gigantic swallow wort. One hundred years after she died, botanist Robert Brown named the Western Australian gravel bottlebrush after her: Beaufortia Decussata.

Prickly fig trees

But not only duchesses took an interest in botany. “Mistresse Thomasin Tunstall” lived in rural Bull Bank in Lancashire, 5 miles north of Hornby Castle, far from noble courts. Tunstall collected rare native plants like the cuckoo flower and lady slipper orchid. Parkinson noted that she “hath often sent mee up the rootes to London, which have borne faire flowers in my garden”.

The marginal notes in Tunstall’s copy of botanist John Gerard’s famous ‘herbal’ show her awareness of plants from the wider world. Tunstall noted that Gerard’s “Prickly Indian Fig tree” grew at “Mr Parkinson’s gardin at the siyne of the goulden morter on Ludyat Hill”.

Women worked with these plants – as well as studied and collected them. A bill from the 1680s for Catherine of Braganza, wife of King Charles II, offers rare evidence of women’s garden labour. Weeders worked among the queen’s sweet-scented tuberoses, Ethiopian bladder senna, purple Virginian honeysuckle, and apios americana sourced from the keeper of the Chelsea Physic Garden. At least one found love amid the blooms. On 19 August 1688, Katherine Griffin married Thomas Williams – one of the queen’s garden labourers – at the Holy Trinity in Knightsbridge and is subsequently listed with the weeding women as Katherine Williams.

What might a weeding woman have thought of the unusual plants she was required to treat like “so many jewels”?

Despite being paid 10p a day or £1 a month (roughly £120 today), half as much as the male gardeners whose names are recorded in the same bills, women like Katherine were adept at their tasks. The “garden of pleasure stored with these out-landish flowers… needeth not so much or so often manuring with soyle, as another garden planted with… English flowers,” John Parkinson had written in Paradisi in Sole. But it did “neede to bee well cleansed from all annoyances… stones, weedes, rootes of trees, bushes”. A weeding woman had to know which seedlings to pull. What might she have thought of the unusual plants she was required to treat like “so many jewels”?

Such work did not go unnoticed. The young noblewoman Celia Fiennes described a statue of an “old weeder woman” in the Duke of Bedford’s cherry garden that was “done so like and her clothes so well that at first I tooke it to be a real living body”. A Mortlake tapestry pictures a woman weeding. Her clothes, which are not as rich as those worn by a nearby noble couple, suggest she might be the gardener’s wife. The daffodils growing beside her were new additions to the decorative garden under names such as ‘Narcissus Africanus’, the French daffodil, and the ‘Daffodill of Constantinople’.

Shining like diamonds

In the garden of pleasure and the adjoining kitchen garden, North American tobacco with its pretty pink flowers became a salve for ulcers and wounds, or a syrup to treat asthma. Manuscript books of recipes compiled by women include “pellitory of Spayne” (likely the North African Anacyclus pyrethrum) in a gargle for phlegm and rhubarb from China in laxatives.

Widely read printed recipes called for sugar, the crystallised product of the juice from the sugar cane plant. With its fine white powder, a lady or her maidservant could transform English roses, borage, marigolds or gillyflowers into “candie hard and glistering like diamonds”. A humbler conserve of native betony flowers and foreign sugar purporting to aid conception instructed its maker to boil “betony new and tender one pound, the best sugar three pound” until they became a syrup. At the start of the 17th century, sugar was a luxury product. But by the end of the century, plantations established in British colonies like Barbados meant sugar was affordable for the likes of yeoman farmers and their wives.

But ‘exotic’ flowers had a darker side. To source specimens, English women relied on imperial trade routes. The Duchess of Beaufort had trees, cuttings and saplings transported from Barbados. One of the ships that transported “poyson trees” for her in 1696 returned to the island in 1702 carrying enslaved people as cargo. Some gentlewomen may have read Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), written to attract sugar planters to the colony. He wrote of a new vegetable root “of which the negres brought the seeds” that was “very good meat” for sea voyages, “boyl’d with powdred pork, and eaten with butter, vinegar, and pepper”. Other pages detailed tortures to keep the enslaved African population in check.

How much did women of the time know about their impact on ecologies and people far away? It is difficult to guess. Today, flowers imported to the UK from markets such as Kenya are plagued by instances of modern-day slavery. Are those of us who admire and purchase these travelling beauties, these innocent-looking roses, plastic-wrapped and transported thousands of miles on planes, so different from early modern women?

Few 17th-century English women may have travelled the high seas to foreign climes but many, particularly the educated and wealthy, experienced the wider world through nature’s bounty. As plants shaped their view of foreign shores, they in turn made these plants into something new. In their gardens, foreign flowers were moulded into emblems of fashion and art, and exotic plants became perfumes, medicine and food. When the young Anna Buckett stitched a pineapple, the curious mind of this ordinary girl was encountering a world miles away from her English pinks and pansies. Or was it? Through books or word of mouth, pineapples had entered her own experience.

Susannah Lyon-Whaley is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of York

This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine