✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

COLONIAL GARDENS AND COLLECTIONS

plantsandculture.org · 735 words · saved by 1 readers

“Empire requires that scientists and their patrons share the belief that the stuff of nature can be captured in words, figures, lines, shading, gradients, or flows…” “European naturalists […] tended to collect specimens and specific facts about those specimens rather than worldview, schema of usage, or alternative ways of ordering and understanding the world. They stockpiled specimens in cabinets, put them behind glass in museums, and accumulated them in botanical gardens and herbaria, but as specimens "stripped of narrative," supporting once again the notion that "travelers never leave home, but merely extend the limits of their world by taking their concerns and apparatus for interpreting the world along with them.” (2) “Plant specimens returned to England on the same boats that took slaves to the Caribbean. And many of the beautiful examples that we admire today were picked and pressed by slaves.” 3 “Natural historians often sent detailed instructions to their European contacts in t

BOTANICAL GARDENS AND COLONIALISM Today, botanical gardens are presented as serene sites for appreciating plants from around the globe. Many of the same botanical gardens that celebrate “exotic” plants, as well as promote ecology and preservation, played a part in stripping the world of its biodiversity and resources. European botanical gardens once served as laboratories and distribution centers for colonial powers. Colonial botanists would collect, smuggle, and steal plant specimens from distant lands to bring them back to these gardens for study. By identifying how to hybridize, cultivate,

Explore this link on the map →

related reading