Botanical travel, climate and David Moore's moral geographies of Europe

•David Moore's botanical travels offered moral treatises on the spaces he encountered.•These travelogues positioned places and people along a developmental continuum.•Discussions of Scandinavia and Iberia were animated by a search for order.•Ideas about climate were employed as a determining factor in cultural development.•The findings echo Agnew's thesis about the collapsing of space into time.

During his forty-year curatorship of the Royal Dublin Society's botanical gardens in Glasnevin (1838–1879), David Moore undertook a number of excursions to continental Europe. These served to deepen the networks of plant exchange between Dublin and other botanical institutions and allowed him to examine the relationships between climate, plant survivability and societal development. This paper focuses on two trips taken in the 1860s to Scandinavia and Iberia and charts how Moore situated his experience of these places within a climatic hermeneutic. Moore's understanding of northern and southern Europe was organized around a set of judgments about their relative backwardness or advancement with respect to his experience of home and was seen through the lens of a moral climatology. Moreover, his Scots Presbyterian background and his commitment to natural theology informed his interpretation of the landscapes he encountered in his excursions across Europe.