Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
The historiography of botanical maps has mainly concentrated on their alleged“golden age,” on maps drawn by famous first-generationplant geographers. This article instead describes botanical maps after the ageof discovery, and detects both a quantitative explosion and qualitativemodification in the late nineteenth century. By spotlighting the case of theplant geographer Oscar Drude (1852–1933), I argue that the dynamicsof botanical mappings were closely linked to a specific milieu of knowledgeproduction: the visual culture of Imperial Germany. The scientific upgrading ofmaps was stimulated by a prospering commercial cartographical market as well asa widespread practice of mediating between professionals and amateurs via mapsin the public sphere. In transferring skills and practices from these“popular” fields of knowledge to scientific domains,botanists like Oscar Drude established maps as an indispensable element ofbotanical observation. This wholesale dissemination of botanical maps had thus aformative influence on collective perception – thebotanist's “period eye” – regardingplant distribution.