Botanical Gardens in the Plantationocene

For a field seminar of the B.Sc., Geography program at FU Berlin, I arranged a visit to the Berlin's Botanischer Garten and Museum and introduced the concept of ‘Plantationocene’ (Chao et al, 2023) to critically situate the institution. At first sight, the botanical garden and the plantation have nothing in common - one is a place of cultural enlightenment, a sense of quiet in the midst of a busy city, and a staged concoction of thriving plants, and an oasis of calm. On the other hand, the monoculture plantation is a sign of doom for ecosystems, human health, and communal life – even as they largely structure global food production and consumption of commodities in industrialised economies. So, why to study the two side by side? What role did institutions such as the botanical garden have in furthering the plantation economy?

Leaning on the work of organizations such as the FDCL and scholars like Katja Kaiser, I invited the students to trace and unpack critically the role of scientific institutions such as the botanical garden. We discussed the colonial traces in the garden and how it formed a bedrock of the modern capitalist economy. We also had class activities to appreciate the vitality and sentience of plants. In this blog, I enlist some of our key points of reflection.

The botanical garden in Berlin, like many other gardens at the time, increased its collections of plants from the German Protectorates. Today, the set-up of the botanical garden did not change largely after Adolf Engler’s phytogeographical arrangements (Kaiser, 2016). Therefore, even today, Haus I and Haus H carry succulents on the “old world” and “new world” respectively (See Figure 2) – these groupings here do not denote a scientific classification based on botanical or biogeographical parameters, but instead reify political classifications and orderings from the ‘age of European exploration'. Cactus plants named after German botanists (such as Pachyphytym werdermannii named after Erich Werdermann) were on display in the garden. Such naming practices was a way of laying claims to ‘discovery’ of unfamiliar plants: it assumed a lack of a 'civilized' relationship between plants and native peoples, which was termed as aboriginal production or 'Urproduktion' (Sabea, 2008).

We then discussed the disciplines of economic botany and scientific forestry and how it furthered the ordering and classifying of plants in order to make available and optimize the production of cash crops in cultivable lands. Documentaries furthered their understanding of how monoculture plantations simplified and tamed ecologies, relying on the exploitation of cheap labour in racialized and gendered ways. Keeping these histories in mind, students were encouraged to take a good look at the Tropishes Nutzpflanzen (Haus C) of the Botanical garden. The Haus even boasts a spice rack where the commodities are on display vis-à-vis living plants. I was particularly thrilled when a student mentioned “I am carrying and drinking a hibiscus tea with me on the tour, but I am seeing an hibiscus plant for the first time”. Others were pleasantly surprised to see other plants prior to their moment of commodification, such as coffee and ginger.

We discussed the technologies, infrastructure, and labour that goes into the sustenance of plants. Plants were studied on and cared for in the gardens, based on their needs and properties as living and acting sentient beings. Gardeners were found watering the plants in the afternoons when we visited the gardens. A student was struck by the fresh, moist, and earthy smell of the central tropical greenhouse. High insulation glass was recently installed in order to reduce the massive energy consumption of the house - maintaining high temperatues being an utmost requirement for the staging of tropical plants in Berlin's cold winters. “We think of plants of barely existing, but there is so much to look at..”, shared a student. Others appreciated the flowering plants in the Asian garden, an early spring here.

After the walk, students reflected on how the garden is an unrealistic collection that does not represent ‘reality’ as it exists out there. Plants from different continents are put together in the same room merely because of their similarities in climatic conditions (we earlier discussed the ‘temporal’ and ‘torrid’ climatic zones as used by botanists until the 19th century). Students also found it problematic that no signs reflect on the colonial history of the garden. “Not all plants are equal in the garden”- some were staged more prominently owing to their size or a quality (eg: the mother-in-law’s cushion exhibit in the Cacti glasshouse). One remarked on the constant signifying of useful insects and pests in the greenhouses: “how these insects are classified seems only to emerging from a human-centric point of view”, he shared with his classmates. However we also noted how the botanical gardens play a key role in preserving vital collections (seeds and living plants) - and this function that may be increasingly significant in the midst of the biodiversity losses of the Plantationocene.

Overall, the trip seemed to be fairly successful, and students picked up on different themes from the seminar. One of them summed it up quite nicely: “I didn’t know we could explain so much with the movement of plants, but we can!”

* Podcast by FDCL on “Curare, rubber, stevia - a colonial search for traces of plant collecting”, Accessible here: https://www.fdcl.org/publication/2020-10-16-curare-kautschuk-stevia-eine-koloniale-spurensuche-ueber-das-pflanzensammeln/

* Sophie Chao, Wendy Wolford, Andrew Ofstehage, Shalmali Guttal, Euclides Gonçalves & Fernanda Ayala (10 Jul 2023): The Plantationocene as analytical concept: a forum for dialogue and reflection, The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI:10.1080/03066150.2023.2228212

* Smith, Paul. "The challenge for botanic garden science." Plants, People, Planet 1.1 (2019): 38-43.

* Sabea, Hanan. "Mastering the landscape? Sisal plantations, land, and labor in Tanga Region, 1893-1980s." The International journal of African historical studies 41.3 (2008): 411-432.

* Kaiser, Katja. "Exploration and exploitation: German colonial botany at the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin." Sites of imperial memory. Manchester University Press, 2016. 225-242.