By Dr. Jessica Moody
Introduction
Plants, Enslavement and Public History aims to contribute to the emerging area of scholarly and practice-based research called Plant Humanities. Plant Humanities considers the relationship between plants and people, and connections to history, society, culture, and more. This area of study aims to enrich current understandings of plants which have otherwise historically focused on biological sciences (botany) or growing (horticulture) by considering plant ‘stories’ more broadly; their various meanings and values for different groups of people and how this has changed over time; their role in spiritual, medicinal, cultural processes for example and many other areas which can reveal new and complex interactions, structures and understandings of the world we live in.
Work in the area of Plant Humanities can be seen within a number of literary and artistic practice-based responses (for example writers and artists who work with, respond to, and develop creative engagements with plant collections) and can also be identified across a number of different academic disciplines and approaches including history, anthropology, archaeology, creative arts, geography, languages and literature, and philosophy. Primarily, being Plant Humanities, the focus has been on humanities disciplines, methods and approaches, (including creative and practice-based work) which has placed a focus on the relationship between plants and people, both historically and in the present day. However, it also seeks ways to speak to and with other more traditional disciplinary approaches including from the natural sciences. Plant Humanities connects to research in more the established area of Environmental Humanities, which considers wide-ranging connections between humanity and nature (and the more-than-human world in its own right). This research (encompassing earlier discipline specific approaches such as Environmental History in the 1980s or Ecocriticism with a literary focus from around the 1990s) became increasingly popular following the environmental movements of 1970s, the concurrent rise in nature writing and rising activism and concerns around the environmental crisis.i There have been some key developments in Plant Humanities in recent years which have accelerated research and thinking in this area.
Dumbarton Oaks: Plant Humanities Initiative
Dumbarton Oaks, just outside Washington, D.C. is a Harvard University research institute with a museum and library. It was donated to Harvard in 1940 by Mildred and Robert Bliss who purchased the property and estate in 1920, redesigning the house and creating the garden with American landscape designer Beatrix Farrand. The Bliss’s had collecting interests in Byzantine history and culture and Dumbarton Oaks later incorporated two further areas of collection and study; Pre-Columbian studies and Garden and Landscape Studies. The building and estate, described as one of the grandest in Washington, was home to a number of well-known figures, including John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850), seventh vice president of the United States (1825-1832) and staunch defender of enslavement in America within political circles and who enslaved up to 50 people by the time of his death.
The term ‘Plant Humanities’ in relation to the interdisciplinary research approach originated from Dumbarton Oaks after the institute received a three–year grant in 2018 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and JSTOR Labs. This initiative included a digital humanities dimension focusing on digitizing the library’s rare books and connecting these to JSTOR’s Global Plants database of digitised plant specimens. They launched Plant Humanities Lab in 2021, as an online database and research sharing platform.
Royal Holloway / Kew Report
In 2022, Felix Driver (Geography, Royal Holloway University), Caroline Cornish and Mark Nesbitt (Kew Gardens) published Plant Humanities: Where Arts, Humanities & Plants Meet. This report, commissioned by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) was one of several projects funded as part of an exploratory scheme identifying interdisciplinary research areas which addressed major contemporary challenges and potential areas for further research. The authors reviewed current projects and consulted researchers, curators and collections managers across universities, botanic gardens and museums. The report identified Plant Humanities as a distinct area of growth since 2015, revealing that a wide variety of disciplines are involved in this area of study. It also highlighted the significant potential for partnership working between universities, gardens and natural history museums. The report made recommendations for further projects in this area, particularly those bringing together arts and humanities and scientific research and identified botanic gardens as a key area for development.
Botanic Gardens
The Royal Holloway/Kew Gardens report made a specific case for the role botanic gardens could play in the development of Plant Humanities research. Some, such as Kew Gardens (which co-wrote the Plant Humanities report with Royal Holloway), Edinburgh Botanical Gardens, and New York Botanical Gardens among many others have been moving in this direction already. Such research has begun to consider the role of botanical gardens as ‘sorting houses’ of plants and empires, international trade, recovery and conveyance (or indeed silencing and omission) of indigenous knowledge and plant names, and creative and practice-based responses to botanical collections as ways of deepening our understanding of the relationship between plants and people. Edinburgh Botanical Gardens suggest this research can help in ‘tackling major current societal issues including climate change, biodiversity loss and the legacies of empire and colonisation.’ii However, Botanic Gardens certainly aren’t the only repositories of plant collections; many museums and heritage organisations, public and private gardens are also important collectors and conservators of plants. Further, thinking more broadly can open up the area of Plant Humanities in more accessible ways; parklands, urban and rural green spaces also have the potential to communicate history and culture through plant stories.
Why does this matter?
There is huge potential through the Plant Humanities to further our knowledge and understanding of connected cultural and historic human stories through plants in new ways. As the Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Initiatives suggests, a large feature underpinning this potential is the global mobility of plants; through trade and empire, agricultural mass development, collecting, migration, foodways and many other avenues, the global movement of plants is a fundamental aspect of the global human story. Further, through their connections to a wide variety of themes, fields and areas including medicine, science, art, as well as history, labour and the environment – plants offer a unique opportunity for cross-disciplinary and transnational, cross-cultural dialogue. The implications for public historical work and public memory – how the past is remembered in the present day – is wide-ranging. In taking plants as a lens through which to view historical subject matter, we can decentre and destabilise existing historical narratives and memory processes which have otherwise tended to frame histories from the perspective of large-scale economic processes, and hierarchies of knowledge and experience which have followed structures of power replicated in the colonial archive.
Environmental change and the climate crisis has brought much of the world of plant-human interactions urgently to the fore. Increasing connections have been made between histories of colonialism and the unfolding environmental crisis since at least the 1970s by African-American researchers, with numerous scholars and activists since pointing to the legacies of environmental colonial processes and structures.iii The introduction of monocultures and mass deforestation undertaken for the plantation economy are part of what some are describing as a ‘Plantationocene’ – a distinct historical global environmental shift caused by the creation of plantation systems in the modern era which had wide-ranging and devastating human and environmental impacts.iv
Conclusion: Plants, Enslavement, Public History and Plant Humanities
How we remember histories of transatlantic enslavement is a critical concern around the Atlantic world. Public histories of enslavement are constantly evolving. There have been key markers of activity such as the 1990s UNESCO Slave Route Project in Africa and Europe, or through anniversaries – usually of abolition in the European and American cases – such at the 2007 Bicentenary of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade in Britain. Work in this area has fought hard to shift the dominant focus from heroic narratives of white liberation or indeed the economic histories and wealth of enslavers, to the lives and experiences of enslaved people; their agency and resistance, strength and perspectives, and to legacies of this history in the present day. However, very little of this work has encompassed environmental contexts and consequences or plant stories. A focus on plant humanities can support this work by developing an approach to what I’m proposing as ‘Plant Public History’. This can help frame a broader research agenda which can draw out histories of gender, growing expertise, health and medicine, folklore, religion and spirituality, foodways and culinary cultures, community and agency as this relates to enslaved people. Much of the ‘plant’ focus in anglophone public narratives of enslavement has thus far only really considered the significance of cash crops to British society – the monocultures of sugar, tobacco and cotton and their economic significance for the plantocracy. These are important stories but they are by no means the only stories. Whilst the focus given to botanic gardens thus far in Plant Humanities can helpfully centre colonial contexts and histories, other, under-explored areas in public history would help communicate another important dimension to this history from the perspective of the lives and experiences of enslaved people. Such areas might include the representation (and reconstruction) of the provision grounds and dooryard gardens of enslaved people in the Caribbean, described as the “botanical gardens of the dispossessed” by Judith Carney who also advocates for conceptualizing such spaces as part of the global colonial network of botanical gardens.v Plant public history can therefore redraw the focus, help us to approach our understandings of the past through alternative routes, destabilising an archive – and a public memory – which has otherwise tended to omit the rich experience, knowledge and expertise of enslaved people in relation to plants.
This is not an uncomplicated task. Part of the richness of this area of study lies in the fact that plants can have multiple meanings to different groups of people. Are some meanings elevated over others? Whilst the focus on plant stories might usefully decentre traditional disciplinary approaches, given the ‘colonial gaze’ of the archive – how can we approach the elevation of different kinds of knowledge about plants and people in this history? And when it comes to public historical communication of these histories and their connections, how can we align plants themselves and green public history spaces as part of this communication? What kinds of methods are appropriate for developing a Plant Public History?
The area of Plant Humanities has the potential to shift a public historical focus towards stories of human agency, skill and resilience, creativity and adaptable, community and togetherness – however, as with all processes of public memory, this still requires a critical focus on choices made around narratives highlighted or left out.
Ultimately, plant stories are also human stories.