In her half-serious, half-playful appeal, Natasha Myers urges a generative suspension of certain anthropocenic logics which, in being taken as “given,” bind imaginations and possible futures according to regimes of extraction and destruction.11Natasha Myers, “From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing Gardens for Plant/People Involution,” History and Anthropology, vol. 28, no. 3 (2017), pp. 1–5. Focusing on human–plant conspiracies, Myers contends that certain types of gardens can be read “as evidence of a range of radical solidarity projects that take as ‘given’ that we are of the plants” and that “our futures hinge on creating livable futures with the plants.”22Ibid., p. 3. These ideas are useful in trying to understand the multifaceted program of the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria (RBGV), which includes a new management scheme known as the Landscape Succession Strategy. The Strategy, in part, will guide the transition of the RBGV’s selection of plantings into one that is more suitable for the projected climatic conditions of 2090.

Midway through the Anthropocene Campus, Melbourne, about twenty participants travelled south of the city center and the Yarra River, to land now known as the Melbourne Gardens of the RBGV. First established in 1846 and now covering an area of thirty-six hectares, the RBGV houses thousands of plants in their living collection and approximately 1.5 million dried plant and fungi specimens in the National Herbarium of Victoria. After gathering at the visitor center, Den, our guide for the Aboriginal Heritage Walk, greeted us and asked everyone their name and where they were from—a gesture that made the whole group implicitly aware of its shared status as (uninvited) guests. The Aboriginal Heritage Walk is a recurring event promoted by the RBGV that aims to highlight the histories and living cultures of the traditional owners of the land. The first stop on our walk was the Oak Lawn, which was established throughout the nineteenth century with the planting of oak species from Europe, Asia, and America. It was here, surrounded by these non-native trees planted by early colonizers, that we were formally welcomed to the land of the Wurundjeri people by Den, an Aboriginal elder whose own ancestry lies in country (referring to lands and waters, as well as seasons, stories, and spirits) further north. In this way, we were all convening on this land as visitors, though having arrived through strikingly different trajectories. Den lit a small fire while explaining the significance of different plants in smoking ceremonies. Having given each of us a eucalyptus leaf, he invited each of us in turn to approach to add our leaf to the flames and circle the fire while waving the fragrant smoke over ourselves. Den then guided us through another part of the garden, stopping periodically as he taught us how to see and appreciate the qualities and uses of particular plants. After our walk, we again gathered on the Oak Lawn where cups of lemon myrtle tea were distributed to everyone and Den and his young assistant spoke of the broader context of what we had experienced. Holding up a map of Aboriginal Australia, one of them pointed to where we were, on the land of one nation among hundreds of others. They then held up the Aboriginal Flag and explained its significance: black represents the people, yellow the sun, and red the earth.

After lunch, we met with two employees of the RBGV: landscape architect Andrew Laidlaw and Curator of Horticulture Peter Symes. Andrew offered us some principles of garden design, explaining that the design of the Melbourne Garden was based on a widely applied concept of “mass and void.” This approach to structuring space initially seems straightforward, its intent to guide the garden visitor’s gaze toward an idealized landscape from a series of fixed viewpoints. These terms have an uncanny resonance on the Australian continent, as the notion of “void” evokes that of terra nullius – or no one’s land – used by British imperial powers to justify dispossession.33Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Peter and Andrew were not oblivious to this, and they were very generous with their time as they guided us through some historically and horticulturally significant aspects of the RBGV, sharing details with us about their irrigation and landscape succession strategies for climate change preparedness. Our second walking tour ended at the National Herbarium of Victoria; here, Wayne and Erin greeted the group and introduced us to the principles and purposes of herbaria, showing us the room in which committed volunteers have spent many hours curating dried plant and fungi specimens.

Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization

In her book Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization, Jill Casid offers strategies for counter-readings of imperial landscapes, in part by considering gardens which fall in the “between space” of revolution and servility.44Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Writing primarily in the context of eighteenth-century North America, Casid considers “the category-complicating early slave gardens” as fundamental reorderings of the master’s plantation.55Ibid., p. 194. The provision of land parcels on the part of plantation owners in some regards was a means of evading the costs of providing food or of rooting an enslaved person to one place. Still, there is much to gain from “a rereading of early slave gardens as everyday aesthetic practices of resistance [which go] beyond poaching to a transformative appropriation of the very ground of the plantation system.”66Ibid., p. 195. Following Casid’s work, it is true that the history of the RBGV, as a former outpost of Kew Gardens in London, is, like other histories, one of displacement. While extremely important, one might view the incorporation of an Aboriginal Heritage Walk into the formal program of the Gardens—along with the Australia-specific gesture of acknowledging country at public events, or the adoption of the Aboriginal flag as an official flag of Australia—as a dubious concession, comparable to that of the slavemaster granting slaves the land to keep a garden. In processing our experience in the Gardens, there is perhaps a justifiable temptation to construct an opposition between the voices we heard. Perhaps an open question would be more generative, bearing in mind that the plantations which once housed slave gardens no longer exist: What future worlds are being invited when space is made for a young Aboriginal man to raise his flag in a colonial garden?

Further reading:

Myers, Natasha, From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing Gardens for Plant/People Involution, History and Anthropology, vol. 28, no. 3 (2017), pp. 1–5.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Casid, Jill H., Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.