Ian Fleming Introduces Jamaican Plants: Gardens, Plantations, and Natural Threats in Dr. No and The Man with the Golden Gun

Ian Fleming’s Dr. No (1958) and The Man with the Golden Gun (1965) – published before and after Jamaican independence in 1962 – each connect the botanical concerns of the island of Jamaica to its colonial past. This article takes a plant humanities approach to these novels, to reveal that Fleming’s interest in Jamaican flora and fauna is inseparable from his interaction with Jamaica as a colony and his reaction to independence.

Fleming’s description of Jamaica in Dr. No opens that novel, focusing on the trees and flowers from the Hope Botanical Gardens bordering the beautiful English lawns of Kingston’s wealthiest homes. The gardens at Hope were just one of the colonial botanic gardens in Jamaica established in the nineteenth century by the British government to exploit the island by improving its agricultural industries. Bond’s encounter with a basket of poisoned, glasshouse-grown tropical fruit in Dr. No is a precursor to another threat disguised by a natural product: guano, a garden fertiliser front for Dr No’s operation at Crab Key, while the scale of the threat posed by Scaramanga’s burning of sugar plantations in The Man with the Golden Gun emphasises the dependence of Jamaica’s economic security on agricultural plants.

As this article will argue, Fleming’s interaction with plants demands more attention within Bond scholarship, as a way of engaging a new readership with the breadth of his work in a time of ecological crisis.