Hyphenated Subjects, Hybrid Species, and Transplants: The Deroin Family’s Horticultural Network in Late Ottoman Istanbul and Beyond

Ottoman elites’ drive to assemble collections of exotic specimens in their gardens during the long nineteenth century led them to recruit horticultural experts from around the world. One was Pierre Gustave Deroin, a French immigrant who lived in Istanbul between the years 1861 and 1914. Deroin’s sons followed him in his vocation and benefited from his transnational networks, some of them tending to the gardens he planted in Istanbul. This paper looks at horticulture as a metaphor for the inseparability of the local and global in late Ottoman Istanbul’s modernization processes. It aims to unsettle notions of national purity and cultural authenticity by looking at the pluralism of late Ottoman urban society through the Deroin family’s life and work, setting up a comparison between their hyphenated subjecthood as French-Ottoman and Levantine Catholics and the diversity of plants they cultivated in Istanbul’s royal and public gardens. Just as the imported trees cultivated by some members of the Deroin family grew into localized fixtures of Istanbul, these hyphenated subjects might be viewed as transplants who rooted themselves in Istanbul and contributed to its place-making practices.