Fertile Grounds
How do British Botanic Gardens understand the concept of ‘decolonising?’
Research Project, MSc Sustainability, Anglia Ruskin University and the Eden Project.
2023
Fertile Grounds featured in-depth interviews with individual members of staff from seven botanic gardens in England and Wales. The interviews took place online during July and August in 2023, and were designed to explore participant’s personal understandings of the term ‘decolonising’, how relevant they felt this was to their respective gardens, and to what extent a ‘decolonial’ approach was being adopted at their place of work, if at all. The primary text that informed and inspired the study was Malcolm Ferdinand’s thesis Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Carribbean World.
This page features a few elements from my 2023 dissertation. If you’d like more info, please get in touch.
Introduction
In June 2020, the director of science at Kew Gardens Professor Alexandre Antonelli, published a piece in The Conversation entitled: ‘It’s time to decolonise botanic collections’ (Antonelli, 2020). The article described how those in the Northern hemisphere have been exploiting the natural resources and knowledge of the Southern hemisphere, including Antonelli’s country of birth, Brazil. He remarks on Kew’s involvement in supporting the expansion of the British empire in the 19th century: ‘we too [Kew] have a legacy that is deeply rooted in colonialism’ and that ‘history cannot be changed, but we must learn from it, to truly understand the power dynamics of the present and pave the way for a better future’ (Antonelli, 2020).
This article prompted a ‘media backlash’ (BBC, 2023) including a report from think-tank Policy Exchange, entitled ‘Politicising Plants’ (Buchan, Forsyth and Gebreyohanes, 2021). At the time of this research, July 2023, Kew doesn’t use the term ‘decolonising’ in an official sense, as director Richard Deverall says, it ‘generates more heat than light,’ (BBC, 2023) – an apt metaphor considering the conditions plants need to thrive.
At the time of writing, it appears that RBG Edinburgh is the only botanic garden in the UK to state ‘we are working to decolonise our living collections’ (RBG Edinburgh, 2023), while Kew and the National Botanic Garden of Wales communicate via their websites what could be described as themes of ‘decolonising’ but using other terminology (RBG Kew, 2022; National Botanic Garden of Wales, 2023).
This prompts the following questions: what does it mean to decolonise a botanic garden? Why do only three mention this (or themes of similar values)? How do botanic gardens understand the term decolonising, and how many are attempting to do this?
The concept of ‘decolonising’ plants and natural collections is an intersectional field of research, unifying concepts of nature with those of culture (Gibson and Sandilands, 2021; Ferdinand, 2022; Mendoza and Zachariah, 2022). While there’s much literature and discussion on ‘decolonising’ cultural institutions such as museums (Giblin, Ramos and Grout, 2019; Hicks, 2021; Perronnet et al., 2021; Whittington, 2021, The Museums Association, 2023), considerably less attention has been paid to plants and botanic gardens (Gibson and Sandilands, 2021), and no previous studies on the concept of ‘decolonising’ UK BG’s have been found by the researcher, indicating that this study could be the first of its kind.
The ‘dictionary of decolonising’ features nouns, verbs and adjectives used by participants when talking about their personal understandings of ‘decolonisation’.
The presentation of the ‘dictionary’ aims to reflect the piece-meal, fragmented and incomplete nature of conversations about the term, blank spaces reflecting what is not said.
Above: scale indicating participant’s familiarity with the term ‘decolonising’.
Above: chart illustrating who participant’s think influenced values at their respective botanic gardens.
Above: quotation pages used in the dissertation
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