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A stitch in time: the legacy of colonialism

in the Americas
18 OCTOBER 2019 BY FERNANDO LUIZ LARA

Home ground: the garden as a site of

colonial critique
19 OCTOBER 2020 BY ILZE WOLFF

Photo essay: land marks

The coloniality of planting: legacies of racism and slavery in 29 OCTOBER 2020 BY ELEANOR BEAUMONT

the practice of botany AR February 2021 on Gardens

27 JANUARY 2021 BY ROS GRAY AND SHELA SHEIKH ESSAYS 18 JANUARY 2021 BY AR EDITORS

Folio: Sennefer’s Garden

19 JANUARY 2021 BY AR EDITORS

Gardeners’ world: a short history of

domestication and nurturance
20 JANUARY 2021
BY PIER VITTORIO AURELI AND MARIA GIUDICI

Botanical ventures of the 18th century planted the seeds

of scientific racism and slavery

Botany, or the practice of botany, might at first appear to be a passive, peaceful, or even
benign activity. But in fact, it was a practice absolutely integral to the expansion of empire. As
a scientific discipline, botany emerged as a consequence of the exploratory voyages that
European colonial powers sent around the world; in a sense, botanists became agents of
empire.

The very act of planting was a form of colonial violence. By the 18th century, these exploratory
voyages, collecting plant samples and bringing them back, had become a vast enterprise.
People like the botanist William Jackson Hooker, director of Kew Gardens between 1841 and
1865, would send plant collectors across the world to discover new specimens, which would
then be brought back, hybridised and taken to other parts of the world to be grown in the
plantation system. This system involved the clearing of land and the destruction of an existing
ecosystem, and the importation of new species that would be grown as a monoculture. There
was an element of violence in the way in which planting took place in different geographies
and landscapes; whole environments were altered through the imposition of certain crops or
plants, which had been planted with financial return in mind.

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In Perken, 2019, Ipeh Nur depicts a nutmeg plantation, common in the Indonesian Banda Islands,
rooted in the death and suffering of enslaved people. Worth more than gold in the 17th century,
the cultivation of nutmeg led to extraordinary violence against the Bandanese by the Dutch East
India Company
Credit:Eva Broekema / Framer Framed

The movement and transfer of certain plants around the world went hand in hand with the
transportation of people. Plantation systems involved the importation of a labour force (that
is, through slavery or indentured labour) that had no previous connection to the place and
therefore was very limited in terms of its capacity to self-organise and resist the violent
regime to which it found itself subjected – though resistance to the plantation system was a
constant feature. Throughout the emergence of the colonial project, vast numbers of plants,
human beings, animals and soil were transported on the ships that were crossing the oceans of
the world.

In her book Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (2004), art historian Jill Casid
describes how, with the vast wealth generated by slavery and the plantation system arriving in
England, a fashion for prints of picturesque Caribbean landscapes – transformed by the
making of the plantation system – emerged. These images presented slavery as a benign
system, depicting enslaved people enjoying carefree celebrations to a backdrop of rolling hills.
This had a significant impact on English landscaping; the quintessentially English landscape
gardens of the 18th century were in fact based on these Caribbean landscapes, shaped by
slavery.

Botany, as a form of classification or taxonomy, was similarly quietly violent. Ordering,

organising and naming species became integral to ordering the wealth of the empire. Notable
18th-century botanists, including Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and the British naturalists
Hans Sloane and Joseph Banks, came to influence the development of scientific racism, as well
as the endorsement of slavery and the colonisation of foreign territories. Colonial natural
science and these systems of taxonomy became very important for the construction of
categories of race and sexuality. Production of different categories of the vegetal world
necessitated different categories of forms of life, including humans; they underpinned the
science of botany, as well as the practice of bioprospecting.

A View of the Roaring River Estate, Jamaica of 1778, depicts a rural idyll rather than the brutal,
unrelenting existence the enslaved people who worked the plantations experienced

Colonial botany involved a process of both extraction and erasure: the extraction of local
knowledge, plants, information and labour; and an erasure of Indigenous knowledge and
ecological practices. Scientific botany attempted to universalise the system by which we
understand life. A plant that was brought to an institution such as Kew Gardens would be
given a Latin name, and in the process, the local knowledge that existed about that plant
would be extracted and the source of the knowledge erased. By supplanting the local name,
the world in which that plant existed also disappeared.

Landscape and nature are widely perceived as a passive, non-changing environment, the static
backdrop or the stage upon which human historical events and actions take place, reflecting
the capitalist and colonial notion of nature as a passive object, a resource to be extracted, to
be profited from, to be controlled and mastered. But in fact, landscape and nature have
agential capacities – they are not fixed but are changing continually, and can be manipulated
by human actors. In some cases, landscapes can be weaponised, from destroying the ecosystem
in which people live, to planting hedges to divide up land and bar access.

‘Much of mainstream white

environmentalism tends to
perpetuate the idea that
‘‘nature’’ or ‘‘the environment’’
needs to be protected from
people, rather than
understanding human beings as
part of ecological systems’
Throughout history, landscape has been manipulated as a way of controlling and dispossessing
certain populations. In the US in the 1970s and ’80s, environmental racism was coined as a
term in the environmental justice movement, which protested against exposure to toxic waste
suffered by inhabitants of poor African-American urban neighbourhoods in Southern states.
Looking around us today, we can see how this persists and, under conditions of Covid-19, has
resurfaced to an alarming degree.

We have inherited from the colonial plantation system a naturalisation of who is to enjoy the
land versus who is to be working on the land, and also who is supposed to be advocating the
protection of the land. The same day that George Floyd was murdered in May last year, a
white woman called the police with false allegations that Black birdwatcher, Christian Cooper,
had threatened her life in the Ramble in New York’s Central Park. During the pandemic, it has
become apparent that the policing of lockdowns has disproportionately targeted people of
colour whose only access to green spaces might be their local park; in London, the
Metropolitan Police are twice as likely to fine Black people for breaching lockdown
regulations, for example gathering in public spaces and parks, than white people. Today,
access to wild and green spaces is heavily racialised; for example, urban areas inhabited by
Black populations commonly experience much worse air pollution, fewer parks and green
spaces, and fewer people have gardens of their own.

At the Chelsea Flower Show of 2018, Floella Benjamin honoured the ancestors of those enslaved
people in a garden display of the ship Empire Windrush, for the 70th anniversary of its landing on
British shores from the Caribbean
Credit:Guy Bell / Alamy

In the context of London, the urban metropole in which we both live and work, we are
interested in thinking through, with others, how alternatives to the coloniality of planting
might be activated, in particular within public space – how alternative histories and
cultivation practices might be shared, and how ownership and access can be questioned. The
garden is a site through which to trace and question exclusions along the lines of race, class,
gender, sexuality and disability, as well as to reconsider environmental justice, which itself
cannot be seen in isolation from social justice, migrant justice, and labour rights. In this
respect, we note the important work of community gardeners such as Carole Wright, with her
ongoing @Blak_Outside project, which aims to address a lack of racial diversity within
horticulture and to increase access to urban green spaces, in particular in south London.
Beyond such initiatives that set out to ‘decolonise the garden’ are groups such as Land In Our
Names, which strives to connect narratives around land in Britain to race, gender and class,
and Wretched of the Earth, a grassroots collective of Indigenous, Black and Brown people
demanding climate justice in solidarity with communities in both the UK and the Global
South.

The coloniality of planting is still with us: the industrialisation of agriculture, of land grab,
and of dispossession, are ongoing processes that, despite the climate and ecological crisis in
which we find ourselves, are still accelerating. Much of mainstream white environmentalism
tends to perpetuate the idea that ‘nature’ or ‘the environment’ needs to be protected from
people, rather than understanding human beings as part of ecological systems, be it rural or
urban. Plants are the most instrumentalised of all forms of life, degraded and overlooked –
rethinking our relationship with them must be understood as part of a wider rethinking of our
relationship with each other.

This piece is based on a transcript of ‘The Coloniality of Planting’, a Camden Art Audio
podcast with Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh, part of The Botanical Mind podcast series by
Camden Art Centre www.botanicalmind.online/podcasts

AR FEBRUARY 2021
Garden

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