An edited transcript of an intro to @decolonisethegarden, given on an Institute of Historical Research Zoom talk (11 March 2021) as part of their History of Gardens and Landscapes Seminar series.
“I founded the @decolonisethegarden account on Instagram in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and when the Black Lives Matter conversation came into the mainstream. It became painfully clear during this period that many people in the horticultural sphere were so far behind the conversation or not even AWARE of the conversation regarding anti-racism and were certainly not in a place where they were questioning their internal biases. It was obvious that there was a desperate need to engage people so that they could help in the effort to end racism and other harmful forms of oppression being perpetuated again and again on the marginalised and minoritised.
I guess the whole thing really began when a prominent garden designer made an Instagram post challenging the gross and obvious lack of diversity within the horticultural industry and questioning what was going to be done about it - and a comment was made under that post by someone who said that gardening doesn’t appeal to non-whites just as R&B music didn’t interest them. The sheer ignorance loaded into the statement [and there was more than just one instance of this sentiment being expressed, by the way] hit me so hard and flipped something in me - I knew I couldn’t stay silent (and complicit) anymore in the face of such a lack of awareness of the privilege, oppression, appropriation, superiority - all of it - at play here. I knew I had to use my privilege to speak up and challenge these kinds of opinions that keep Black, Brown and people of colour (like myself) oppressed.
Then in tandem with all of this I was receiving all sorts of messages from gardeners, telling me of racist incidents that they have had to endure during their time gardening and what a relief it was to be able to have these conversations openly and honestly at last and to be heard instead of being gaslit.
It became clear to me that ‘ordinary’, ‘nice’ gardening folk needed to wake up and recognise the part they, WE, all play in upholding an unequal system that perpetuates racism, violence and trauma on people of colour.
So, I see the account as a way of disrupting the comfortable (but harmful) status quo and as an invitation to gardeners - who might not think that issues of racial and social justice apply to them - to sit up and pay attention and understand the ways in which they might be complicit in contributing to harm and to ask them to think about interrogating their biases.
I hope the account prompts people to question the narrative and lens through which gardening, gardens and plants are often viewed and to understand how that can lead to a superior view, an erasure of other people and cultures and how this can link to oppression (whether intentional or not).
I think the lens through which we do view gardening in this country is often very twee, saccharine and rose-tinted. It ignores the reality of many issues - including social and racial injustices inherent in this space.
I was reading an interview just yesterday that Corinne Fowler - who wrote Green Unpleasant Land and who contributed to the National Trust report into the colonial links of their properties - gave to Ink Cap Journal. In it she says:
“The barriers to land access today are emotional as well as financial. While white people have been taught that they belong in the countryside – or that the countryside belongs to them – people of colour often experience outright racism and hostility, alongside a sense of alienation from a mythical rural culture”. I think this idea of a “mythical culture” is also very apt in the gardening sphere too. Gardening is portrayed as such a white space in the UK. There are social inequities and injustice at play here - but gardening could easily be viewed as the preserve of white people. The academic and garden writer, Jamaica Kincaid, talks in her book, My Garden (Book), about how “to name is to possess” and I think that’s more than evident in gardening. From the naming of plants supposedly “discovered” by white men to the claiming of aspects of gardening as being particularly “English” - people, history and cultures are erased in this way and people of colour are excluded from belonging in this space.
I find gardening a really interesting and useful vehicle for bringing these issues to people’s attention and inviting them into the decolonising/anti-racism conversation - because so many people assume gardening is just about pretty flowers, gentility and niceness - it is about these things (and as we have seen in this past year of lockdowns - access to green spaces is so vital for people’s health and wellbeing) - but it is also so far from the truth of the whole story. So many aspects of interconnected justice issues can be tackled using gardening as an entry point - not least race, class, land and food justice. And if you delve into the history of plants, gardens, land and botany... it’s impossible to avoid the realities and legacies of colonialism, imperialism, extractivism, theft and violence.
As Christine mentioned in the introduction, posts and input into the @decolonisethegarden conversation on the Instagram account are contributed to by many engaged members of the gardening community - both keen hobbyists and professionals - and it wouldn’t be what it is without this joint effort.
Towards the end of last year a group of us gardeners, growers and writers came together to pen an open letter to some of the leading organisations in the UK horticultural industry - including Kew, the RHS, Edinburgh Botanic, and the National Trust - to ask what their intentions and plans were regarding equality, diversity and inclusion (and also anti-racism). The letter and the responses are available to view on the @decolonisethegarden account. We tried to include measurable actions in the letter because it’s all too easy to say the right words and make empty promises - all of which are pretty meaningless without some kind of action and progress. There needs to be some kind of accountability.
[I believe a mention of this letter by Jane Perrone in a Financial Times article last year is what brought @decolonisethegarden to Christine’s attention and led to this chat.]
More recently I’ve been working on a quilt fundraising project with Jess Bailey of Public Library Quilts. Jess has been working hard to hand make a quilt using plant-dyed fabrics which have been generously donated to us from the gardening community. When the finished quilt is unveiled in the near future we’ll be launching our fundraiser to raise money for Land in Our Names - who are a Black-led, grassroots collective working in Britain to secure land for Black people and People of Colour.
Finally, the @decolonisethegarden account has also been somewhere to hold space for difficult discussions around racism regarding specific horticultural organisations and their lack of awareness in their words and actions when it comes to racism and other forms of oppression and harm. The aim is certainly not to ‘cancel’ anyone but it is most definitely aimed at waking up the industry to make them engage with these issues. It would be nice for influential individuals to stop pretending these issues are irrelevant to them and for them to begin understanding their role and their responsibilities in tackling them to make the horticultural industry TRULY WELCOMING TO EVERYONE. Writing ‘decolonising’ reports, putting the words ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ in goals or on a website are meaningless without the accompanying action - particularly if the actual behaviour of the organisation or members of staff (especially senior, influential members of staff) is problematic and demonstrates the opposite of what they proclaim to be.”