A Delightfully Deadly Botanic Spark: Gail Carriger’s Witty Aside
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
May 4, 1976
The novelist and archaeologist Gail Carriger was born.
Writing under her now-famous pen name, she has become a doyenne of steampunk fiction, celebrated for her sparkling wit and frothy concoctions of manners, espionage, and the occasional dirigible.
In Poison or Protect, the first of her Delightfully Deadly novellas, Carriger introduces us to Lady Preshea Villentia — she of four late husbands and a wardrobe composed almost entirely of mourning black.
Preshea is a professional assassin, but one with impeccable taste and enviable social poise. At a house party buzzing with gossip and danger, she navigates Scotsmen, lobsters, and secrets with equal aplomb.
It is, however, another character who delivers the gardener’s perfect rallying cry. Lady Violet, surveying her suitor with dismay, proclaims:
“We do not suit. You have no genuine interest in botany!”
Lady Violet practically yelled her final conclusion.
This was the biggest sin of them all.
How deliciously true.
A man may lack fortune, charm, or even hair, but to be indifferent to botany is unforgivable. In Carriger’s world, as in our own, the absence of botanical interest is not merely a failing — it is a social calamity.
Lady Whistledown herself might have penned the line in her scandal sheet, whilst Vita would have nodded gravely over her roses at Sissinghurst.
One cannot help but cheer Carriger’s audacity in smuggling horticultural allegiance into a steampunk romance. It is proof that even in the most outlandish adventures — with assassins, lobsters, and plots galore — the garden still holds sway. Readers are reminded that passion for plants is no triviality but a standard by which society, and certainly romance, must be measured.
