How even our plants have been politicised

LAST year, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew announced its intention to ‘decolonise’ and acknowledged its ‘exploitative and racist legacies’. Its director, Richard Deverell, declared: ‘We are at a fork-inthe-road moment.’

The outpouring of feeling around the world at the death of George Floyd meant that long-standing injustices had to be faced up to. Kew could not and would not stand aside in this great reckoning.

‘Parts of Kew’s history are shamefully drawn from a legacy that has deep roots in colonialism and racism,’ he said.

‘Much of its work in the 19th century focused on the movement of valuable plants around the British Empire for agriculture and trade, which of course means that some key figures in our past and items still in our collections are linked to colonialism.

‘We were beacons of discovery and science, but also beacons of privilege and exploitation.’

One of his colleagues added: ‘Plants were central to the running of the British Empire.’

But what does it mean, practically, to ‘decolonise’ a garden? Not much, in truth.

One of Deverell’s plans was to change display boards and descriptions so that, for example, any mention of sugar and rubber plants would reflect their links to slavery and colonialism. He also wanted to stop plants being described as having been ‘discovered’ at certain times because they were known to indigenous communities long before Western botanists and explorers came across them. His other main suggestion was to make sure that ‘people do not feel intimidated by the Victorian wrought-iron gates of Kew’. As though there were friendly wrought-iron gates and unfriendly ones and it is necessary to land on the right side of this divide, as all others. In an editorial, the Guardian supported Deverell, arguing that the botanical gardens were far from apolitical. They came from an elitist Western pursuit for exotic plants that were often collected with economic purposes in mind. The ‘white men’ who did this had an agenda, it said. As the paper’s headline blared, ‘Botanical Gardens inextricably linked to Empire’. Just like everything else, you might say.