This paper attempts to show how exotic plants (and their metaphors) are taken out of their natural places of origin by European naturalists and literati in the age of Romanticism, when early forms of imperialism and globalization are emerging. It focuses on the upas tree, a poison tree of Java, whose image attained currency in English when Erasmus Darwin depicted the fierce "HYDRA-TREE of death" (3.238) in The Loves of the Plants (1789), the second part of The Botanic Garden, which was extremely popular in the 1790s. Darwin introduces, in a prose note to the upas tree, N.P. Foersch's article on the poison tree that appeared in the London Magazine in 1783. In addition, he quotes the whole article in the "Additional Notes" to the poem. Foersch's description of the upas tree captured public attention all the more because it was in a note to Darwin's famous poem, and was much discussed by naturalists as well as orientalists, both in England and in colonial outposts. Darwin's image of the upas tree, together with Foersch's account, enticed them to find and examine the upas tree, which had never been seen by European naturalists before. This paper examines the ways in which the image of the upas tree both influences and is influenced by scientific and ethno-historical discoveries on the poison tree of Java, taking examples from Darwin, Southey, Shelley, and Kipling in literature, and Leschenault and Horsfield in science. Vast new networks of science and empire uproot plants from their native places, transfer them globally, and acclimatize them to new places, in order to be analyzed, and to be commercially and scientifically useful to Europeans. Responding to this global migration of plants, literature recreates images of exotic plants. The "myth" of the fierce poison tree is replaced by scientific research on the poisonous components of the upas tree. After the decomposition of the old myth of the poison tree of Java, however, the upas tree acquires powerful new images as a critique to colonialism and globalization, in the hands of poets and novelists, who metaphorically transformed the plant into an image of Britain's sickening global power and extending network of colonialism.
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