Gardens and Empires - The Stories
My head is still full of the stories I heard last Friday and Saturday, at a conference called, Gardens and Empires. Hosted by the British Library, it was a joint venture between the library, Kew Gardens and English Heritage.
Kew Students Thomas Dawodu and Ferdinand Leigh
The stated aim of the conference was: “to stimulate discussion on Gardens and Empires, bringing together different views and ideas”. The conference planners had put a call out for papers and some 18 papers were chosen.
The academic research took us all over the world, from Bogata in Colombia to the Botanic Gardens in Singapore to gardens in Taiwan and Australia. Each deeply researched paper formed another part of a jigsaw puzzle showing how plants have been used across the globe to reinforce political power and to generate wealth for one nation at the cost of another nation’s land and people.
Today we wander around historic landscaped country estates with little awareness of where the money came from to build these gardens. In the 18th century so many trades and industries were entwined with slavery and huge fortunes were made. The easiest way to move from trade to gentlemen was to acquire or build an estate. But as historian Advolly Richmond and Dr Catherine Middleton of Historic Environment Scotland explained, most of these histories are little known.
There was a wonderful presentation from another academic Dr Diego Molina who took us on the journey of ‘exotics’. He pointed out that the nurseries involved in this trade were not simple nurseries, they were ‘industries’. The plant hunters were portrayed as heroes. But it is surely not heroic to cut down 4000 trees in order to take 10,000 orchids as one of his sources detailed. He described how for the market these plants needed to be ‘new plants’ so alongside plants that were now sold with heaters for your greenhouse to house them, the nurseries set to hybridizing the orchids so they could have more ‘new plants’! And these plants were now exported along the trade routes of the British Empire.
Large institutions are also now having to examine their past. I had no idea how many gardeners Kew was sending all around the globe. Associate Professor Timothy P. Barnard from Singapore University told us of Henry Ridley sent by Kew in 1888 to promote ‘economic botany’. Apparently Ridley ‘broke the code’ of how to get the maximum amount from rubber plants. So in the early 20th century, rubber moved from the botanic garden setting to be an agricultural product and native trees in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam made way for rubber trees.
Fiona Davidson, who is the Head of Archive at the RHS, described how you may think your organisation was not directly involved but the most recent parts of the plant collector archive that went online in April reveal how, between the 1820s and 1860’s, the RHS was sending people out to the colonies to do plant collecting. As she said, we need to work out what we do with these stories, how can we use them to ‘seed’ the research that needs to be done of what is NOT currently in the archive; the plant knowledge of the indigenous people, the labour force used to gather the plants.
As you see the faces in the old black and white photographs and listen to researchers carefully explain that they won’t be using the derogatory language used in documents, you realise that these are the stories of individual people at the heart of all this.
The two young men, Thomas Dawodu and Ferdinand Leigh, from Nigeria, arriving at Kew in 1893 desperate to get a full horticultural training. Kew’s view was that this was ‘an experiment’. The men faced appalling racism and when they returned to Lagos they were never promoted to full curators in gardens during their careers. Kew ended ‘the experiment’ and it would be another 50 years before another African trainee joined the Kew training programme.
In another paper called ‘Interpreting European gardens funded by Leopold II’s personal ownership of the Congo Free State’, Jill Sinclair told of the unnamed people from the Congo, men and women both adults and children who were brought to be part of a ‘human zoo’ at the 1897 World Trade Fair in Brussels. They were there all summer, things were thrown at them, they were taunted for a reaction.
At the end of the two days someone said very succinctly: at the heart of all these stories is ‘exploitation’. For some in the lecture theatre in the British Library, listening to these papers, is especially poignant. Judy Ling Wong of the Black Environment Network said: “this history is painful to those of us who have suffered these injustices”, challenging us that if we want to research gardens and empires we can go anywhere and we will stumble upon it.
I hope that this conference is not the end of these stories but the beginning of more.