Crafting, Growing, Knowing: Flowers and Gardens in 17th to 20th Century Nepal

Growing flowers and maintaining gardens was a widespread activity in the places that today comprise Nepal. Myriad specialists - gardeners, priests, metal and wood workers, scribes, scholars, and administrators - devoted minds, hands, and materials to the pursuit. Flowers and gardens were a field of artisanal skill, ritual necessity, scholarly attention, and administrative concern. Traces of the dense historical attention paid to all things floral remain in varied media and genres - compendiums, orders, lists, memories, artifacts, forms of worship, and imprints of gardens past. Weaving together these traces, this talk explores the practices and politics of crafting, growing and knowing in these places from 17th to the 20th century. Articulating approaches to investigating the diverse knowledge cultures and systems of skilled practices across South Asia, the talk offers ways to think the region anew.

A historian based in Kathmandu, Surabhi Pudasaini is research director of the Center for the Study of Knowledge, Materials, and Materiality (KaMM Center). Her work pursues questions of knowledge, skill, making, and production in Nepal and places north of the Siwaliks. She is currently working on a scholarly and public history project on mining and its knowledgeable practices in 18th to 20th century Nepal. Alongside, she is designing a collaborative research project on arbori-horticultural skills and knowledge in South Asia.

Astrid Zotter teaches at the Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia at Heidelberg University. She has been working in various research projects, including the Collaborative Research Centre “Ritual Dynamics” or the Research Unit “Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Premodern Nepal” of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Her research and publications focus on Hindu traditions and on Nepalese history and languages, dealing with topics such as rituals, festivals, goddesses and plants. In winter 2025/2026 her monograph Flowers, Gods and Scholars: The Puṣpacintāmaṇi, a Nepalese Digest on Flowers in Worship will be published by Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing (HASP).