why decolonize botanical gardens?

2023-05-17 12:00:12

Ahen many European natural history museums are working to “decolonize” natural histories, two important books shed light on the stakes of this debate. In The Empire of Nature. A History of Colonial Botanical Gardens (late 18th^e century-1930s) (Champ Vallon, 380 pages, 26 euros), Hélène Blais forcefully recalls how much these colonial institutions come from two logics that are not always compatible.

First conceived as vegetable gardens useful for supplying the colonies, as in Cape Town (now South Africa) in 1652, botanical gardens gradually became the center of a collection and acclimatization of species. , then become “practical tools of colonial governance, with a view to permanent territorial occupation”. Barely arrived in Algeria, the French created in 1831 a garden in Algiers, both a farm and a trial garden, constituting a real “government nursery”.

Aiming to improve environments, the botanical garden refers to colonial engineering and, through its recreational dimension as an urban park, must demonstrate the superiority of the European presence. The gardens are part of an economic development of colonial resources. But this economic issue is not the only one: it is coupled with a scholarly dimension.

The British will encourage a vision of hierarchical and structured sets, with botanical departments that branch out into several gardens and multiply experiments. The author relativizes the centralizing role of metropolitan gardens, a representation based on the British model.

In Paris, in fact, the National Museum of Natural History has long remained at a distance from colonial circles, even suspicious of them, and does not represent “an organ dedicated to colonial botany”, which precipitated the creation, in 1899, of the Colonial Garden. The scientific activities of each garden, which revolve around the identification of new species, classification, are organized from different facilities: the herbarium (place for storing dried plants), the library, the laboratory or the museum .

Capturing vernacular knowledge

Defined as « zones de biocontact », the gardens are based on capturing vernacular knowledge through the mobilization of local experts (peasants, doctors, slaves, gardeners) who most often remain anonymous and reduced to the status of informants in the articles, establishing a sharing between European science and local knowledge. Increasingly dependent on economic profitability, this scientific role was marginalized when analytical botanical science lost its prestige in the first half of the 20th century.^e century.

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