Gardening and agriculture have long been important in Christian spiritual metaphors and mandates. Modifying the cultural mandate of Calvinism, to “be fruitful and multiply,” Evangelical Baptists saw the act of cultivating plants as a way to liberate oneself from sin and achieve moral improvement. This idea became even more important for the missionaries in India, where they viewed the Bengali countryside as a “moral frontier” to be tamed and civilized through agriculture and gardening. In this way, each mission station established by the Srirampur network featured gardens and farms that provided self-sufficiency, profit, and (in theory) the means of morally improving Bengalis by teaching industrious habits. The early Srirampur network also depended on a pre-existing network of Evangelical indigo planters and their overseers in the Malda area, like George Udny and Charles Grant, and they expanded this network with their own stations and itinerant preachers. In this way, plants became an important method by which to mark the “moral frontier,” but one which sometimes challenged such divisions and created new hierarchies, since the Bengalis already practiced settled agriculture in these areas.