Abstracts

Throughout modern history, botanic gardens have served not only as centers of science and beauty but also as instruments of colonial expansion. In the late nineteenth century, Buitenzorg Botanic Garden in West Java exemplified this complex role. Here, European botanists, leveraging local botanical knowledge and native expertise, transformed sacred landscapes into sites for botanical cultivation and cash crop acclimatization. These efforts led to the conversion of forests into plantations for tea, coffee, and rubber, laying the foundations of modern capitalism. The garden became central to the Dutch colonial mission, where science, economy, politics, and culture converged, and the land itself witnessed the forces of colonial conquest and transformation.

Building on an NEH-funded multi-year project, this talk uses case studies from the New York Botanical Garden’s Mitten Collection to examine the ways that a ubiquitous and commonplace plant — moss — can be used to interrogate the hierarchical and sometimes disparate nature of colonial natural history collections using interdisciplinary methods and stakeholders across the arts, sciences, and humanities. Emphasizing the silencing of indigenous voices and fieldworkers in 19th century South and Southeast Asia as a window into this larger collaborative project, Thinking With Moss raises questions of credit, attribution, scale, subjecthood, and sensation in relationship to how these collections are represented digitally and made accessible, using methods in decolonial design and the digital humanities.

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault discusses the rise of the new natural history as a practice of information distillation that constructed a “new field of visibility.” The herbarium exemplifies this new classifying order, stabilizing the living plant to render it mobile, exchangeable, and exploitable. Focusing on the work of Temitayo Ogunbiyi, this paper explores how contemporary artists engage with the herbarium’s colonial legacies to interrogate its rigid taxonomies and economies of scale, while also revealing its evolving and dynamic nature as a biocultural archive and workshop.

Collections of historical plant material often take the form of herbarium specimens, which form the pride of natural history collections. While decolonial efforts have made the material transfer of living beings across borders a process requiring great care and regulation, what to do with existing collections of old dried plants has yet to fall under scrutiny. This paper explores the narratives that justify the need to maintain these collections and suggests alternatives. Using oral history and publicity materials, it's argued that the often-contradictory claims work to wrest power from decolonial efforts so that control can be maintained at colonial institutions.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, tens of thousands of European settlers lived in Shanghai. They left behind extensive notes about every imaginable aspect of their lives, with gardening being a key component. In this presentation, Professor Li draws from a diverse collection of multilingual archival sources to critically investigate the clash of gardening ideas, methods, practices, and aesthetics between European settlers and the city's native residents. The evidence allows for an appreciation of how Shanghai's cityscape was radically transformed by the encounter between Chinese and European botanies.

This presentation will explore what interdisciplinary knowledge in the burgeoning field of Plant Humanities can look like, both in academic and public-facing settings. To do so, it will present two case studies from the New York Botanical Garden's Humanities Institute — a series of garden exhibitions titled The African American Garden (2022-2024) and an experiential learning workshop titled Human and Natural Histories of the New York Botanical Garden (2025). These initiatives bring together a team of humanists, scientists, and horticulturists to promote intellectual exchanges among different disciplines and experiment with forms of plant scholarship other than writing.

The talk will focus on the tea bush as a vegetal artifact that, when left alone, can grow up to 10-15 meters in height. Pruning ensures it remains at chest-height to enable tea pluckers to pick its leaves, while allowing it, in the words of one contemporary planter, to “generate vegetative growth.” Conspicuous evidence of the ecological simplifications ushered in by plant capitalism, each bush is also a dynamic site of multispecies interactions between humans, plants, and nonhuman animals. The talk therefore refocuses our attention on the tea bush as a locus of horticultural practice, commercial extraction, and biopolitical encounter.

Unearthing: Discovery, turning over, disturbance, ungrounding. Radicle: An emergence, anchoring, an utterance turned toward soil. This paper is situated amid the collisions and collaborations of soil and plant mobilities examined through pigments and dyes.

World’s fairs promised to gather and show the wonders of the world in one place and one time to the millions who attended. These events entailed the movement of raw materials, manufactured goods, buildings, plants, animals, and people at massive scale, from global distances.  This paper investigates the trans-Pacific journeys of resources that created the gardens and structures of Japan in the United States. In transporting specimens of nature from unprocessed to refined forms, exhibitors delivered displays of culture that supported the commercial and political ambitions of a growing empire.