The magic eye of empire and memory: The Singh Twins, Botanical Tales and Seeds of Empire

By Jessica Moody

The Singh Twins, Botanical Tales and Seeds of Empire, Shirley Sherwood Gallery, Kew Gardens

11th October 2025 to 12th April 2026

I recently visited Kew Gardens in Richmond, London, to see a new exhibition from The Singh Twins (Amrit and Rabindra Singh) which explores ‘art, empire and the enduring significance of plants.’ [1] The exhibition, inspired by Kew’s botanical archives, is made up of a series of fabric light boxes which explore connections between botany, empire and the role plants have played in this history. The Singh Twins use an approach which they describe as ‘Past-Modern’, drawing on traditional Indian miniaturist and other historical styles in new ways. This exhibition brought together two sets of work; around the outer edges of the gallery, a new light box collection themed around economic botany (largely inspired by the Wallich Herbarium at Kew, a collection of over 20,000 dried plant specimens); and in the interior, the ‘Masala Art Series II’, ten allegorical portraits exploring the folklore of herbs and spices which in contrast to the more financial and exploitative relationship with plants of the outer light boxes, celebrated the cultural value and significance of plants.

Decorative illuminated drawings of figures and plants larger approximately 2 metres in height, in darkened room, with viewers in front. — The Singh Twins, Botanical Tales and Seeds of Empire. Photo author.

Kew Gardens has its own entangled history with empire and colonialism. As the ‘botanical arm of Government’ Kew was integral to the development of an ‘economic botany’ whereby ‘useful’ plant specimens (e.g. tea, coffee, tobacco, quinine, lime) were brought to Kew from around the British Empire, for collection and cultivation and for further transportation to an expanding imperial network of botanic gardens around the world [2]. This relied on a highly organised network of global botanical gardens and shipping routes. The mid Atlantic island of St Helena, probably most famous as the place where Napoleon was exiled and died, was known as the nursery of the British Empire, and played a significant role as a place for testing and acclimatising plant specimens as they were moved around the empire, including on their way back to Kew.[3]

The Singh Twins’ light box artwork merges original historic archival imagery, including advertisements for European uses of the plants considered, alongside new artistic creations using the style of Indian miniatures, digital technologies and hand-painting. This merging – of original archival materials and new creative interventions, creates complex, rich and intricate pieces. I found that at first glance, it was not clear what was new and what was an original image, so seamlessly did the visuals work together. It was like looking at a ‘magic eye’ picture, where an alternative image is hidden within the pattern, visible only on close inspection or alternative looking. The light boxes are beautiful and vibrant, adorned intricately and embellished with striking colours and designs. But when you looked closely, the historical reality underpinning the beauty comes unsettlingly to the fore. These are rich and detailed pieces which deliver a sense of the overlapping, entangled relationship between plants and empire; the beauty and wonder of plants alongside the exploitation and violence of their cultivation and production, a reality lost in the sanitized imperial messaging around the marketing and consumption of plants as their end products of cocoa, dyes, sweets or as rubber-based products.

Close up image of square light box with decorative multicoloured imagery of plants, people and pattern, with blue background. — ‘The Fuel for the Empire’ The Singh Twins. Photo by author.

Although much of the focus of The Singh Twins’ work for this exhibition is on the East India Company, the works also included connections to the Caribbean and the Americas and to the global history of enslavement on plantations. This is a useful feature of looking at the history of empire through a plants-lens; it encourages us to see the global connections more holistically, understand trade routes and interconnections between East and West, between different colonial spaces and experiences that might otherwise be divided into distinct geographical spaces; into the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean.

The work titled ‘Fuel for the Empire’ (left), explores the commercialisation of nature and the different ways plants were used as ‘fuel’. The four stars highlight four key plants that were used as ‘fuel’: palm oil (to lubricate machinery), rubber (used in industrial manufacturing), timber (for ship-building), and rice (as a key food crop in India). In addition, the work has four further ‘vignettes’ which highlight other key plants; grapevines (taken to Australia), maize (staple food of indigenous peoples of America), citrus fruits (key export from the Caribbean and Africa), and the breadfruit.

The vignette featuring the breadfruit, pictured below, includes the image of the Brookes slave ship, a Liverpool ship whose diagram was used by abolitionists to illustrate the inhumanity of the trade in enslaved people, shown packed into the hull of a ship as cargo. The breadfruit (known as Uru in Tahiti) plays an integral role in the history of colonial enslavement. Breadfruit plants were taken from Tahiti by the British in the eighteenth century, intended as a cheap foodstuff (they grow quickly and provide calorie-rich fruit) for enslaved people in the Caribbean. The first attempt to take breadfruit plants across the Pacific Ocean ended in one of the most famous mutinies in history; aboard Captain Bligh’s ship the Bounty, where a mutinous crew threw the plants overboard and sent Bligh and 18 of the remaining crew off into the Pacific Ocean in a smaller boat, steering the Bounty back towards Tahiti. Many historical retellings of this episode tend not to elaborate or focus on connections to Caribbean enslavement [3]. In his 1997 poem, The Bounty, St Lucian poet Derek Walcott reframes this narrative with the breadfruit – and its Caribbean links to land and family – more centrally. The poem can be read, as Hannah Rachel Cole, suggests, with ‘botanical agency’ – whereby the breadfruit itself played a key role in the insurrection, resisting becoming part of the plantation system [4].

Snails move into harbour, the breadfruit plants on the Bounty

will be heaved aboard, and the white God is Captain Bligh.

– Derek Walcott, The Bounty (1997)

Although Bligh eventually succeeded in bringing the breadfruit to the Caribbean in 1794, at great effort and expense, enslaved people refused to eat it and it only became a staple foodstuff after emancipation. It has since become a staple in Jamaican cooking [5].

Decorative illuminated drawing with blue background with plan drawing of ship transporting enslaved people, a figure of a Black woman on left and breadfruit surrounding it. — Close up of border image of ‘Fuel for the Empire’ showing breadfruit. Photo by author.

In ‘Fuel for Empire’, it is notable that the ship that appears next to the image of the breadfruit tree is not the ship most famously associated with it (at least in European discourse), but a slave ship, indeed the Brookes, which in the context of the public memory of enslavement has come to stand in as the slave ship, a universal symbol. Underneath the ship cogs turn, as this staple foodstuff was drawn into the colonial machine, intended to fuel human beings as they laboured in the plantation system. The bee which floats next to this is perhaps a reference to Manchester and its city emblem, and the industrial cities of northern England that were fed by plants like cotton, grown by enslaved labour in the Americas.[6]

The intricate and beautiful designs of The Singh Twins light boxes reveal deeper, less beautiful historical truths and entanglements, but only on close inspection, through the magic eye of empire and memory. By looking through a mythology of empire which might otherwise obscure the full and complex colonial history of plants, these artworks draw myriad connections across continents to global histories, linking peoples and cultures, tastes and consumption, food, medicine and technology. Their beauty felt in some ways disturbing given the historical subject matter, but in this way they achieved a level of disturbance and disruption to broader public memories of empire.

The Singh Twins, Botanical Tales and Seeds of Empire runs until April 12th 2026.

References

[1] https://www.kew.org/kew-gardens/whats-on/singh-twins-flora-indica

[2] https://www.kew.org/read-and-watch/botany-trade-empire

[3] McAleer J. ‘A young slip of botany’: botanical networks, the South Atlantic, and Britain’s maritime worlds, c.1790–1810. Journal of Global History. 2016;11(1):24-43. doi:10.1017/S1740022815000339

[4] DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 8, no. 3 (2007) https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cch.2008.0003.

[5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20240221-breadfruit-the-caribbeans-hurricane-resistant-food

[6] Cole, Hannah Rachel. “Breadfruit in the Wake: Imagining Vegetal Mutiny in Derek Walcott’s ‘The Bounty.’” Latin American Literary Review 48, no. 96 (2021): 35–39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48762290.

[6] On the relationship between enslavement and the industrial revolution see Eric Williams, Slavery & Capitalism (1944)

Climate Crisis, conservation and the compounding threats to Caribbean collections

Zakiya McKenzie – November 2025

In August 2025 I visited the Natural History Museum of Jamaica in downtown Kingston. The public exhibition on Jamaican bats and the library at the museum are worth the visit, but another treasure lies in the herbarium. There I met the Curator for the National Herbarium, botanist Keron Campbell, who shared perspectives on Jamaica’s vulnerable plant archives, ecological change, and overlooked figures in Jamaican botany.

Campbell outlined multiple issues that distinguish tropical herbaria from temperate ones. These problems underline the precarity of plant archives in the Caribbean, and the importance of legislative and institutional support. They include:

Humidity: Moisture-filled air accelerates the decay of preserved specimens.

Pests: Insects, particularly the cigarette beetle, can infest and destroy entire collections.

Infrastructure: Many institutions operate in historic buildings not designed for modern conservation, making climate control a constant struggle.

Power Outages: The managed process of rotating specimens through freezers to prevent infestation is entirely dependent on a consistent power supply.

Hurricanes: These events cause recurring damage to infrastructure, storage, and human safety.

Books and dried plant specimens on desk with worker in lab coat. — Inside Jamaica’s national herbarium

Close up of dried plant samples in book. — A pressing of lignum vitae held at the Natural History Museum of Jamaica

Last week, Hurricane Melissa’s path through Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic was a real-time example of this precarity. It is the first Category 5 hurricane to make landfall in Jamaica and the third-most intense hurricane formed in the Atlantic Ocean since records began. While the full extent of the damage is still being assessed, the storm caused widespread power outages and flooding, and unfortunately, deaths, across the region.

This event underscores a central injustice of the climate crisis. The Caribbean faces intensifying hurricane seasons and bears a disproportionate brunt of climate impacts despite having contributed minimally to the global carbon emissions that drive them. This reality makes the work of institutions like the Natural History Museum not only one of preservation but also of urgent climate resilience.

In light of Hurricane Melissa, the need for support is immediate and critical. If you are able, please consider contributing to the relief and recovery efforts:

Fundraiser by Black Curatorial : Caribbean Hurricane Fund: Melissa

Support Jamaica – Government of Jamaica – Official Disaster Relief & Recovery Portal

What is Plant Humanities?

Close up photograph of bark of very tall tree with tree canopy showing above. — Image: Ceiba tree by wallygrom is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

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.

Photograph of garden room with arched windows lining pale stone walls, a timber framed room and elaborate green vines twisting around the windows and room. A few chairs and tables are in the room. — Image Dumbarton Oaks Sunroom by miketnorton is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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.

Photograph showing pond with large green waterlily pads within a glass roofed green house. — Image: London – Kew Gardens – Waterlily House 1852 Richard Turner – View NNW II by Txllxt TxllxT is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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.

Category: plants