Artificial Ecologies within the Botanic Garden: About the Symbiosis between Humans, Plants and Technology

• In Event: Controlling Environments, Growing Plants - II

Abstract

The Royal Botanic Garden in London, UK, offers an almost emblematic fieldsite to Anna Tsing’s (2015) question of the possibility of life within “capitalist ruins”: It started out as a colonial project of the British Empire but in recent years the botanic garden with the most diverse collection of plants in the world redefined itself as a kind of noah’s ark of the plant world. It is nowadays also a place of massive artificial ecologies.
During my field work in Kew Garden’s tropical nursery, where many extinct and endangered so-called ‚tender‘ plants are being propagated, grown and kept alive with the help of different forms of automatised and manually operated technologies as well as the botanic horticulturists‘ practices of care, I observed how 21 climate zones were artificially constituted via the constant regulation and adjustment of humidity, temperature, shading and ventilation. In my presentation, I want to conceptualise the tropical nursery as an artificial ecology in which different elements affect each other permanently and enter into symbiosis with each other as a form of “reciprocal capture” (Stengers) in order to keep alive certain species of plants. The formerly colonial project of the botanic garden is thus composing a heterogeneous infrastructure of care with the goal of conservation – which nevertheless is based on practices of selection and killing. My work contributes to the question of the actual configuration of artificial ecologies as well as to the growing field of multispecies ethnographies that cross the boundary between ‘the natural’ and ‘the artificial’.

Author

• Franziska Dahlmeier, Hamburg University