| The subject of this dissertation is Californians' attempts to understand and define themselves and their newly formed state from 1848 to 1915. The project examines the subject through the lens of Californians' intensive practice of floriculture during this period by focusing on these floriculturists' visions for the state and the connections they made all across the state, the nation, and the world.;The history of California after 1848 includes narratives of chaotic (and frequently corrupt) struggles for political and social power, environmentally destructive competitions for resources, and violent conflicts amongst multi-ethnic populations, such that the state faced being branded a notoriously uncivilized place. California floriculturists undertook a project both to actively civilize California and Californians (changing their nature), and to represent the state and its people as eminently civilized (changing their public image to the nation and perhaps the world). From 1848 to 1915, they transformed their spaces from what they originally saw as blank canvases into an international garden of landscape and commerce and struggled with the questions about the nature of their state and what made the state and its people cultivated.;This project is a floricultural history of California through eight chapters ranging from the construction of taste to Asian American efforts to create social safety nets through floricultural work to women's wild botanizing inside and outside the academy. As these floriculturists transitioned from thinking about how they fit into California to how California fit into the United States and the international community, they ultimately embraced a definition of cultivated (in the context of landscape but not society) that embraced imports from around the globe as well as the state's native blooms. |
