A small exhibition at the Garden Museum is restoring the story of a botanist who is little known today, but was on the cusp of honours before he died tragically young.
At its centre is John Bradby Blake, an English botanist working in Chinese Canton in the late 1760s while employed by the East India Company. But the exhibition’s real achievement is in restoring visibility to the Chinese collaborators without whom his work would have been impossible.
Bradby Blake’s botanical ambitions depended on relationships forged in Canton (now Guangzhou), most notably with Whang At Tong 黃遏東 and the botanical artist Mak Sau 麥秀. Their collaboration produced an extraordinary body of work: more than 150 paintings of Chinese plants intended for an unfinished book.
For the first time, thirty of those botanical paintings are being shown in the UK, more than 230 years after they were made.
But the exhibition is more than that – it tells the story of an Englishman in China, learning about the local plantlife, cataloguing it for science, and sending samples back to Europe for cultivation.
There are research notes, books, and old maps dotted around showing the detailed work carried out by the three men. An early “spreadsheet” records from 1774 what seeds were sent where, listing for example, that new varieties of Juniper seeds were sent to Chelsea and Kew for study – an essential aid in improving the taste of gin.
Typically, in exhibitions about European explorers, the locals are an afterthought, but here they are front and centre, and in fact, the two largest portraits are of Blake’s Chinese colleague, Whang At Tong. The exhibition has a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, no less, thanks to Whang At Tong bringing Blake’s documents to England following Blake’s early death at just 28 years old.
The papers were given to Blake’s family, and had Blake not also sent copies to fellow botanists, his reputation might have disappeared into the archives. However, his work was championed by the botanist Joseph Banks, and his legacy formed the basis for a chain of influence in botanical art for decades to come.
Rather than presenting Blake as a solitary figure, the exhibition positions him within a network of mutual curiosity and expertise. It shows how botanical knowledge travelled through conversation, collaboration and trust, shaped as much by Cantonese artists and scholars as by British collectors and institutions. In doing so, the exhibition offers a timely reminder that global science has long been built on exchange – and that some of its most important contributors have only just begun to be properly seen.
The exhibition, Seeds of Change, is at the Garden Museum until 10th May 2026.
- Adult: £16
- Senior citizen: £13
- Student / Unemployed: £9
- Art Pass: £8
- Child (6 and under): Free
- Child (7-18): £9
- Family 1 (1 adult, 1 child): £20
- Family 2 (2 adults, 2 children): £40
More details here.
