‘Thoroughly Chinese’: Revealing the plants of the Hong merchants’ gardens through John Bradby Blake’s paintings

John Bradby Blake’s paintings should be admired for their sophisticated arrangement of accurate botanical features and vivid colouring, but they have a greater significance than just their artistic value. They not only represent a range of plants previously unknown to the west, but the majority also reveal a range of plants grown in the gardens of Chinese in Guangzhou (Canton): therefore they provide a precious insight into a thus far relatively neglected topic in Chinese garden history, namely the cultivation of plants in gardens. This paper identifies one of the gardens from which the plants depicted might have come, and looks at how plants were used and appreciated in their Chinese context.