Multisensory exhibitions are old hat, but in the case of In Bloom – How Plants Changed Our World at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, it feels just right to sit in a space given over to flowers with the sound of gurgling water in the background, mingled with the cries and chirrups of birds. At intervals there are scent stations where you can smell damask rose or green and black tea from flower-shaped chalices. From the ceiling hang swaths of green muslin. I could have stayed here all afternoon. Right in front of me were also two delicious studies of tulips to illustrate the Dutch craze of the 1630s. Frankly, if it came to a choice of two-tone tulips or bitcoin as a way of squandering money, I know which I’d prefer.

There is a print of a sultan’s seraglio in this tulip section. The courtesans’ pleasure gardens, we learn, were enlivened by flowers brought from the Ottoman dominions. Tulips were in fact native to Turkey, but it was when they came to the Netherlands that the mania set in. Huge financial gains could be made from ornamental flowers. But while this rampant commodification began to warp our relationship with the natural world, at least the speculators had pleasure in their investment.

Right next to the tulips are the roses, with a heavenly painting of open-cupped blooms by Henri Fantin-Latour. The nearby painting by John Ruskin of the modest English dog rose can’t really compete. You can also smell the damask (Damascus) rose here; it’s bewitching.

Striking papier-mâché models make you realize how pornographic flowers are

Striking papier-mâché models make you realize how pornographic flowers are

But flowers weren’t the only plants to inspire devotion. The Victorians famously went wild for ferns and undertook hunting expeditions to find them. There’s a picture of a tulip fern bud which is the image of a bishop’s crosier: gorgeous.

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