A Paper Garden: Jean-François Séguier’s Plantation Diaries

Résumé 0

On several occasions during his life, Nîmes naturalist Jean-François Séguier (1703-1784) kept diaries of his plantations. A prose without literary qualities, it constituted a companion to the material and intellectual management of the hundreds of seeds that Séguier collected, received and grew each year in his gardens. From the perspective of garden archaeology, they enable us to understand the materiality and organization of these domestic botanical spaces, at the level of the entire garden or parts of it. The diaries are also part of a chain of writings that stitch together seeds and their names, words and things. In this way, they make the garden, like other forms of collection, a visible and sentimental projection of their owner’s invisible networks.