Welcome to Historical Plant!
'...these new plants from far away, like the people far away, had no history, no names, and so they could be given names.’ Jamaica Kincaid
To walk around a lot of gardens in England is to take a world trip of sorts. I'm not just talking about places like the Eden Project or the Royal Botanic Gardens at Edinburgh or Kew, where that's at least a large part of the point. A huge number of the plants that adorn our back gardens, window boxes, balcony pots, and our local parks have travelled hundreds and thousands of miles to grace our outdoor spaces. Of the sixty plants listed by Country Living as the 'best types of flowers you should have in your garden’,1 which include sunflowers, roses, sweet peas, and tulips, around 80% were not native to England at all, according to a highly unscientific flick through Google.
To be clear, this is not a bad thing. My very first plants of my own were chrysanthemums that my Granny potted up for me to take home and promptly neglect to death. Popping the fuchsia buds that hung over the paths on my way to school was one of the great delights of my childhood, and nasturtium leaves were one of the first things from our garden that I knew were safe to eat. The rose that bears my birth name blooms every year in that same garden, and my Mum sends me a photograph whenever it comes into flower. These plants and more are embedded in our consciousness as gardeners and plantspeople through a thousand tiny memories, all bringing us the joy of growing things and making our lives that bit brighter (an undeniable necessity over the last two years or so).
But for every one of these plants that have come so far to be with us, there is a story, a history. These aren't just seeds that blew in on the wind, but often plants that were found in their native habitats, uprooted, and brought here deliberately; they had names and stories before their "discovery" by Europeans. They were enjoyed, venerated, loved by the people in their native lands and provided food, medicine, and beauty for centuries before we even knew they existed. So often in these journeys across oceans and continents, they were stripped of those stories, those significances, even their names, and named anew for the people back at home who were to be entranced by these new delights from far-off lands. As Jamaica Kincaid says in her essay ‘To Name is to Possess’, they had ‘no history, no names, and so they could be given names’ in a deliberate act of erasure by colonial plant hunters and those who sent them.2
This is what made me want to start writing this blog. While making notes for my RHS qualification early in 2020, I was reading about the virtues of the binomial naming system for plants, the Latin(ish) names such as Bellis perennis for daisy or Calendula officinalis for pot marigolds. One of the expected answers as to why the binomial system is so useful was that it ‘overcomes the problems of local language’, providing a uniform naming system that can be used the world over. From a scientific point of view, there is, of course, a strong case for such a naming system in an increasingly interconnected, international scientific community, and plenty to admire in the one formulated by Linnaeus in the mid-eighteenth century. I was, however, incensed by the phrasing in my course materials, the suggestion that local languages were to be "overcome" in this way, especially when many of the names given to these plants bear no trace of any name they might have had before, instead being named after scientists, collectors, and sponsors. I annotated my notes in red with the sort of rude comment that makes me glad I'm the only one who reads them, and determined to learn as much as I could about these "other" names. For the plant portfolio that forms an important part of the qualification, I decided I would include, alongside the compulsory facts like growth habit and uses, a short paragraph on their histories, especially those that had come here thanks to colonialism. The first of these I did was for Tagetes erecta, known here as the African marigold, and I quickly realised that a short paragraph wasn't enough even to scratch the surface of a story that covers five continents and an ocean. Thus, the first post of this blog came to be.
As fascinating and awesome as it is to understand a little more of the history of these plants, though, there is pain in their stories too. The popularised image of the intrepid plant hunter discovering new species for the glory of this or that Empire very deliberately glosses over the pain and devastation that came with some of these "discoveries". The theft of tea by Robert Fortune was part of a particularly ugly period in British Imperialism and is part of the story of the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century.3 These wars resulted in Hong Kong being a British colony up until 1997,4 well into my own lifetime. The local trade in cinchona bark was decimated following Europeans' discovery that quinine could treat malaria; they circumvented a local trade embargo to ship plants to Indonesia and produce more quinine so that they could carry on colonising more of the world.5 Even today, these same forces of greed and capitalism have complicated local Peruvians' relationship with quinoa such that many can no longer afford their staple foodstuff,6 led park rangers in Saguaro National Park to microchip cacti against their theft for sale on the Black Market,7 and given rise to exploitative labour practices in the growing of vanilla in Madagascar.8 It's vital that we explore these histories and current realities, instead of erasing and forgetting them, and to tell as close to the full story as we can.
Learning the histories of these plants will not, in and of itself, do much good, though. The world will not be saved just because a few more people know that African marigolds were originally called cempoalxochitl, or because they can name some instances of colonial and botanical skullduggery that happened a few centuries ago. This knowledge cannot be treated as an end point. The erasure of people and stories from botanical history and the perpetuation of colonialist narratives leads to direct harm today, harm that is part of a global nexus of racism and imperialism that extends far beyond our green spaces, reaching into all aspects of life right now. This is the imperative behind the efforts by organisations such as English Heritage9 and the National Trust10 to explore and acknowledge the colonial legacies tied up with their properties, including those directly linked to slavery, but it’s something we can educate ourselves on in a smaller way too.
This all may seem a far cry from the solace and balm we take from gardening, especially in the last year and a half. It is so tempting, as James Wong pointed out in a 2020 article, to think that gardening is or should be immune from politics, and to turn away from this history. However, he points out in that same article that ‘all aspects of gardening are based on political ideas’,11 which makes them no more immune to the broadening of our historical knowledge than anything else getting the same treatment at the moment. This is especially true with a legacy as long-lasting and damaging as that of the British Empire, which turns up time and time again as aggressor. My own family’s history is tied up with the Empire in the first half of last century, but even without that kind of personal connection, this is the history that we inherit as Britons, especially white Britons, and we should not ignore it. None of this means we cannot or should not still love our plants and gardens. As Monty Don put it, ‘we should not feel guilt so much as feel inspired by a sense of responsibility to create a better future’.12 I hope this blog can provide a small contribution to this effort to move forward and come to a greater understanding of our beloved plants precisely because of, not in spite of, their complex, sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful, but always fascinating stories.
Sansone, Arricca Elin, 60 Best Types of Flowers You Should Have in Your Garden
Jamaica Kincaid, ‘To Name is to Possess’ from My Garden (book), p. 91
Butterworth, Andrew, Opium wars | Kew and The history of tea: From China to India | Kew
Walker, Kim, and Nesbitt, Mark, Just the tonic: A natural history of tonic water | Kew
Philpott, Tom, Quinoa: Good, Evil, or Just Really Complicated?
McGiveney, Annette, 'Yanked from the ground': cactus theft is ravaging the American desert
Lykke Lind, Peter, Madagascar's £152m vanilla industry soured by child labour and poverty
English Heritage, Black History
National Trust, Colonialism and historic slavery report
Don, Monty, Full Monty: Healing Social Pain, Gardener’s World Magazine, August 2020