Gardens & Empire

I’m an historian of empire. Since the 1990s, when I earned my BA in History with a concentration in European Imperialism and the Third World, I’ve been preoccupied with themes of race and power; cultural encounter, change and continuity; and religion and politics. I know that dominant narratives are rarely inclusive ones, and that by asking different questions, we find new answers. Revising history to gain a fuller understanding of the present is both my motivation and my commitment.

Imagine my shock, then, when I set out to train as a professional gardener in 2019 and became curious about the origins of the plants I was learning to identify and grow — the vast majority of them native to places other than the UK — only to discover that every answer available to me relied on heroic narratives of great European explorers. Garden history was stuck in an imperialist past that postcolonial studies had long since exploded. It was in desperate need of rewriting.

I resolved that I would do it. So I put my historian’s hat firmly back on my head and set about revising garden history in order to shed some light on the fuller contexts of plants’ acquisitions and to show by example what can and should be done. For the time being, my attentions are focused on writing Botanica, my book which re-tells the stories of how plants from the Americas found their way to England and beyond. It will be published by Elliott & Thompson (UK) and Chelsea Green (US) in 2027.