Botanical Drift: Protagonists

of the Invasive Herbarium

Introduction Kay Evelina Lewis-Jones 110

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll 5 A Seed in Stasis: Seed Banking and the
The Useless and Confusing: Vegetable Gardening of the Wild
Philosophies and Performances in the Kew
Economic Botany Collection Indigo (Indigofera tinctoria)
Raqs Media Collective 118
Vegetable Sheep (Raoulia) An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale
Caroline Cornish & Mark Nesbitt 19 Natasha Eaton 126
The Life Cycle of a Museum Indigo Drift: Raqs Media Collective
and Sepia Blues in the Colonial Archive
Swan Plant (Gomphocarpus fruticosus)
Germaine Greer 29 Coco de Mer (Lodoicea)
The Swan Plant: Did It Drift or Was It Pushed? Melanie Jackson 147
Coco Indécent
Tumatakuru (Persoonia)
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll 39 Mandrake (Mandragora)
Māori Nomenclature and Colonial Classification Matteo Pasquinelli 163
in the William Colenso Archive Arbor Inversa: The Intelligence of an
Inverted Tree
Miss North’s Pitcher-Plant (Nepenthes northiana)
Emma Waltraud Howes 50 Buttercup (Ranunculus)
Subcutaneous “Ha-has” and the Evolution Alfred Döblin 174
of Polymorphic Animalcules “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume,”
Kim Berit Heppelmann 62 in Der Sturm (September 8, 1910,
The Making of a Dress and September 15, 1910)
Claire Loussouarn 64 Wietske Maas 183
Dancing with Nature off the Leash The Murder of a Buttercup
Natasha Myers 69
An Anthropologist among Artists in the Gardens Bracken (Pteridium)
Connie Butler & Hazel Dowling 197
Strangler Plant (Ficus pertusa) Flora Exotica: A Pteridomanic Performance
Philip Kerrigan, Alana Jelinek, 73
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll Black Locust Tree (Robinia pseudoacacia)
“Plants in Their Homes” or the Tendency to herman de vries 201
Strangle the Other with Anthropomorphism I AM

Water Hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) Cherry Laurel (Prunus laurocerasus)

Rebecca Anderson 85 Alana Jelinek 209
On Beautiful Weeds and Invasive Plants: Prunus laurocerasus and Other Species
Joseph Henry Maiden’s Correspondence
with Kew Pear Tree (Pyrus betulifolia)
David Edward Allen & Maria Buzhor 221
Seed Bomb / Caribbean Trumpet Tree (Tabebuia aurea) Ultra-humanity
Bergit Arends & Sunoj D 96
The Subversive Potential of Seeds: Biographies 231
A Performance in Three Acts (2010, 2013, 2014) Acknowledgments 238
This is for those that surround us / make shade, make food / this is for those
basics for which we are too ungrateful / for those quiet sapbleeding prematurely Introduction
harvested fruits / for those rootbound, earthholding, countererosions / for those
nestparted / deadleaf summerfires / spiderarchitectures / black on white snow
graphics. For those who prefer canopy and those that dwell in flower beds /
the controlled chaos / the airwaste breathing / filth composting. For the green in
my eyes that is there when I look at you. For the green that was here on this green
planet before we were / for the green that we now fight for / attach slogans to /
unite parties under / have to turn into kitsch in order to defend, just the basics / Khadija von The Useless and Confusing:
and what of your complexity? and what of your extraction? what of your beauty, Zinnenburg Carroll Vegetable Philosophies and
Green? what of your yellow? and what of the flecks of red that become brown? Performances in the Kew
and what of the whites? and what of your contoured edges that give way to black / Economic Botany Collection
that become all sorts of other colors / mixed, mixed into bottlegreen / ashgreen lime
into pigment, into powder, into hair, into cream, rubbed onto my body / soft sided
genital of a thorny aloe. This is for you when you speak / when you are alone /
this is for you, your wood-wide web of roots / this is for you, that takes the heat
of the sun and gives the chillies burn / for you who spread your branches like
I spread my word / who give us the pages / for you, all for you.

Botanical
 plant is either useful or curious in the eyes of a curator at Kew’s Botanical
Gardens. As documented collections of living plants for the purposes of
scientific research, conservation, display, and education, botanical gardens
are well-tended areas infamous for their connection to the expansionist
projects of European imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.1 Neither instrumental nor exotic, the plants in this volume could
Now, where be said to be at once both useless and confusing—only in so far as they
you amount, again, are so complex that they confuse attempts to condescend with explanations of
in my hands, intelligence. They sing their inaudible songs to each other and dance slowly until
we freeze them. Exploited for food, finance, or flowers, the plants explored in
bottomward in the year,
these pages become useful. In cultivation, focus is on yield, speed, and scale, but
what of those that evade use, plants that are anarchic, lazy, promiscuous, ugly,
the stammered-at tit and contorted? Their character and behavior subvert feminized botany and the
dissolves in utter colonial herbarium.
blue
Pressed into fine, irreplaceable sheaves of paper, plants themselves are the very
Paul Celan, Kew Gardens
support on which this study is printed. They push the pages of this book into blossom,
in your hands; each of them guides a chapter, individual but interleaved, sheltering
each other in the linking themes of invasion, survival, co- and procreation.

The chapters follow collaboratively carried-out interventions into the systems of

Rilke wrote: ‘These trees are
magnificent, but even more
magnificent is the sublime and
moving space between them,
as though with their growth
it too increased.’
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Kew Gardens with a range of artists and historians, curated by Petra Lange-Berndt
and myself. This introduction outlines the series of responses enacted on June 5–6,
2014, directly in the living archives at Kew, including the Marianne North Gallery,
the Economic Botany, and other plant collections. The proposition of drifting within
the formal order of botany set out in Kew was our starting point for Botanical
Drift. Staged as a physical drift through the gardens, a large group of walking,
dancing, speaking, performing participants experienced twenty site-specific
interventions.
toward a philosophy of plants
The premise of this book is that plants are protagonists that guide humans on
botanical drifts. There are contrasting perspectives in philosophy on vegetal wisdom.
In animist society, plants are the avatars of spirits and beings that have drifted from
their human form: like shadows, quietly linked to the body, plant forms are seen
as the internalized, ultra-essence of the human. Yet, on the other hand, Socrates
contests that the trees and countryside are not able to teach us anything, while
the city however can. 2 Thus the city is reduced to the denatured producer of
knowledge, while in fact in Kew this is not the case, as the plants themselves attest.

6 B ot a n ic a l Dr if t Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll 7

Botanical Drift presents a counter-argument to the dismissal by Socrates of trees
as teachers; it posits precisely that trees present us with more than a shadowlike,
long-dead, and hollow white log. Trees are met as individuals and treated as having
symbolic function. Their trunks can have a horizontal figuration on voids of space
or carry the weight of growing vertically with its attendant social and relational
structures. We can experience from plants the “utter blue” that Paul Celan, and
Natasha Eaton, found at Kew.3 In the process of designing this book an utter blue also
became the abstraction of the earthiness of green material in this artist’s field guide.
In the methods of the artist responding to plants, how does the artist-researcher
themself become vegetable in gesture, material, or process? In writing Botanical
Drift, how does the writing itself become a botanical drift, and, in turn, how
does that kind of drifting through botany disrupt the standard order of plants in
the environment? Does an intuitive identification with certain plants in artistic
research reveal another way of approaching botany? The artworks emergent
in Botanical Drift indicate such subversion of classification.
What kind of environmental philosophy can be garnered from vegetable organisms,
and what kind of historical protagonists do plants make when they become the
object of economic botany and art tools? Economic botany is a trove for the contem-
porary historian and artist; and this book coalesces their individual perspectives on
discreet items within the collection and on the institution of Kew. The idea grew
out of an increasing set of studies of plants in the history of empire in which
individual species are used as cyphers to trace colonial trade, social, and scientific
practices. Commodity histories of globalization are unfurled through plants as
artistic protagonists. Each with a discreet chapter, these protagonists are invasive
water plants, traveling milkweeds, seeds, ancient trees, ferns, pears, sea coconuts,
buttercups, and their flowers, feeders, collectors, and breeders.
to critiquing deforestation, the impoverishment of soil and farmers, the loss of
vernacular knowledge, and the creation of industrial infrastructures dependent
on agricultural economies. 5 However, focus on the economics of botany can also
dangerously flatten other agencies that may be at play in such cases. For instance,
if one reads The Botany of Desire into the cola nut’s history then the plant is possibly
not a victim of commercialization but a clever intoxicant that capitalizes on the
human desire for stimulants to produce labor to further proliferate and develop the
spread of the species itself.6 Botanicals like the cola nut enter a commercial circuit
and acquire a symbolic dimension that the artists in Botanical Drift accentuate.
Colonial expeditions set out to collect plants—the Wardian case was the first portable
greenhouse, the transport mechanism for economic botany (below). What follows
the cultivation of economic crops of sugar and other plants are histories of slavery
and monoculture. Economic plants are said to go through four phases of becoming:
domestication, exchanges, modes of production, and regulation. Kew’s Economic
Botany is a nineteenth-century collection of materials from around the globe
(that continues to collect and now holds over 85,000 specimens). This miniature
world in Kew, its elaborate greenhouses and follies, is the site and material of this
investigation. Titled Botanical Drift to describe the movement through the gardens,

Other exhibition experiments in the same vein as Botanical Drift include

Tropicomania: the Social Life of Plants at Bétonsalon, which applied Arjun
Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff ’s concepts of “social life” and “cultural biography”
to plants. Their tropicomanic ambition to “map the socio-economic, cultural and
political implications behind the circulation of tropical plants since the end of
the 16th century” 4 begged the question of what is economic about botany, and
how does this relate productively to the kinds of transnational colonial histories
that we want to trace? Otobong Nkanga’s protagonist was the cola nut, the cola,
which together with the coca leaf, makes the caffeinated drink. Taking on a Member of Kew staff, possibly Harry Ruck, Storekeeper,
history in economic botany with such a multinational as Coca-Cola lends itself packing a Wardian case, 1940

8 B ot a n ic a l Dr i f t Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll 9

the work in this book also willfully drifts away from scientific botany by proposing Wietske Maas, The Murder of a
alternatives to standard ways of approaching plant science. That said, to crystallize Buttercup, site-specific performance,
Botanical Drift, June 15, 2014.
the art-science dichotomy can be reductive, since scientific research has recently Photo © Olaf Pascheit
begun less to privilege humans over plants and instead to develop a new biocentric
approach to plants, for instance in plant neurobiology.

Arrière-garde to this trend are those ecologists like Germaine Greer who approach
their environmental projects through taxonomy and a Darwinian observation
of conflict between species. Of all the contributions to this book, Greer’s is most
rigorous in its attention to the botanical science of taxonomy. This impression was
only enhanced at the 2017 Hay Festival where a strain of programming on writers
of recent ecological treatises such as her own unfolded conflicting philosophies.7
Between Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and Greer’s White Beech: The
Rainforest Years (2013), the anthropomorphizing of plants is a central point of
conflict. Botanical Drift historicizes the scientists’ and artists’ anthropomorphism
of plants in the debate between the anthropology of science as explored by
Natasha Myers, the art historical perspective of Phillip Kerrigan, the artist
Alana Jelinek, and myself.

This project is not only a drift through and around an archive and a garden as
archive, but also more an animation of the shadow lives of plants in that space.
The most extreme instance of this is perhaps Wietske Maas’s translation of Alfred
Döblin’s The Murder of a Buttercup, the expressionist masterpiece that tells of
a botanical drift into the madness and destructive forces of love and obligation
between plants and humans.
There are histories of invasive species in the contributions by Bergit Arends, Hu Yun,
Sunoj D, and Rebecca Anderson. Contemporary models of ecology posited by artists
as environmental activists contrast with the historical and ideological moment
out of which Kew was born. Alana Jelinek’s contribution, which is both a work
of fiction and of subtle commentary on interspecies interdependencies, identifies
the construction of discourses about “nature” and naturalized class superiority.
Jelinek sets her fiction in The Field (2008–17), her ecological experiment on a
plot of land where she used only pre-industrial forms of land management, made
artworks, and explored the ethics of engaging with human and non-human others
(p.210). The Field is in absolute contrast to Kew, where pervasive anxiety about a
public that may disrupt the order of what were previously private, royal gardens,
is overcompensated for by toilets, signage, and strict rules. Look, don’t touch!
Promenade, don’t plow! And certainly don’t plant or lust.
Factoids at Kew include the first female gardeners in 1898, who were made to
cross-dress as men, so as not to distract their male colleagues, or encourage “sweet-
hearting.” At the same time, on stage, American dancers like Isadora Duncan and
Loïe Fuller were already embodying flowers through gesture and costume.8 The
research for Botanical Drift was developed in collaboration with dancers and
gardeners. Rather than employing the latter as skilled workers that have for cent-
uries out-gardened each other for aristocratic patrons, we wanted also to speak
across the divide at Kew between gardeners and scientists. The outcome of one
such collaboration with a gardener is David Edward Allen’s Pear Tree project, a
long-term graft of a European and an Asian species of Pyrus, or pear (pp.221–30).
As these two, P. betulifolia and P. pyraster, exchange limbs, vascular tissues grow
together. As grafts whip and tongue, Allen’s drawings, photographs, and diary
trace the poetry of their hybridity. They become more and more hybrid as time
passes and we are reminded of the botanical root of the term for mixing species
that was so negatively connoted in the nineteenth century.9

10 B ot a n ic a l Dr i f t Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll 11

power, centrality, the roots, and the trees
The carefully bound and waxed scars of Pear Tree’s grafts follow scientific
horticulture and, like a surgeon’s assistant, Allen repeats the technical terms.
Yet the implications of the experiment to grow an Asian and a European—as they
may symbolically stand for those artificial categories of “East and West”—blooms
beyond the greenhouse. For in the scientific record there is also a trace of the
passion of the scientist in their relationship to the study, however translated
into jargon. The changing color of the vascular tissues of the pears as they grew
together then became a marvelous rather than monstrous growth. Species to
species, the horticulturalist is drawn to the plant, over and over, recording their
love in the poetry of attention. Words like “inosculation” become a mantra for
the graft representing the naturalist’s love. For what can be more devotional
than finding words and ways of portraying the other and thereby grafting the self
to blend and become one with another? There is in Allen’s conceptual writing
about his horticultural process the poetics of gardening.
This book primarily anthologizes contemporary artists’ uses of plants. 10 The
word anthologia means to gather flowers, as in a collection of “posies” of writing.
These were small poems or epigrams in anthologies, and this book is a gathering
of a similar kind. The process of inviting artists to participate in Botanical Drift
resulted in each developing a proposal. For instance, herman de vries, a pioneering
Dutch plant artist (who began his working life in gardening school in 1949 and
worked in agriculture and plant disease research before becoming an artist in 1953)
sent us the following instruction:
Find in Kew the oldest tree, or the biggest or a great individual of a rare
species. Bring around a white ribbon with a golden text with the text
“I AM”
The most ancient trees are collected together by Kew in a publication, and we
selected a group of them for de vries’s piece and wrapped the trees as we passed
them during the Botanical Drift (pp.204–08). By chance, a black locust tree was
the main protagonist for de vries’s chapter, its recent Hungarian fame unfamiliar.
Artists Ágnes Bakk and Bence György Pálinkás have recently made the theater
performance and video piece Invasive Alien? which ridicules how the Viktor
Orbán government’s agriculture minister uses the recently nationalized tree,
now renamed the Hungarian black locust, as a false symbol, made instrumental
in policy-making rhetoric. 11
12 B ot a n ic a l D r i f t Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
Trees in their symbolic and philosophical form are also the topic of the chapter by
Matteo Pasquinelli. Picking up on how the Deleuzian metaphor of the rhizomatic
root system sought to lop the centralized image of rooted power, Pasquinelli takes
the rhizome’s once radical decenteredness further into the twenty-first century
network society. A reappraisal of Darwin’s appreciation of plants becomes part
of a much wider and more complex history of research into plant intelligence
and the use of the tree as symbol of the abstract world of logic and of religious
architectures. Since the digital network’s co-optation into neoliberal surveillance
techniques the rhizome is also no longer the radical alternative to the tree that
it was for Deleuze and Guattari.12
gendering botany
Botany also becomes instrumental in legal and pharmaceutical regimes which
are used to justify and defend certain power structures. The artist Uriel Orlow’s
series The Crown Against Mafavuke takes as its starting point the trial of Mafavuke
Ngcobo, an indigenous herbalist, who was accused by the local white medical
establishment of “untraditional behaviour” in 1940 in South Africa. Imbizo Ka
Mafavuke (Mafavuke’s Tribunal) is based on one of the many true stories of a
pharmaceutical company stealing a traditional recipe, thus exposing another
twist in the drama of ideological and commercial confrontations between two
medicinal traditions and their uses of plants. Indigenous knowledge is under-
mined to justify commercial gain in the colonial context in which alternative
medicine drifts between notions of purity and origin, gender and race. The loss
of knowledge about the uses of plants in traditional medicine and cuisine is
another vast subject that many artists have tackled. For instance, Zheng’s video
Pteridophilia (2016) sets a pornographic scene of boys with ferns in the Taiwanese
fern glades, which the artist says were intimately known to and used by indigenous
groups (p.14 top). 13 Redressing the history of Chinese communist ideology in
his work, Pteridophilia responds to the ways in which Chinese society ignored
ferns post-1949.
Ferns are the perfect protagonists for an exploration of the queerness of plants,
as Connie Butler and Hazel Dowling displayed in their performance Flora Exotica:
A Pteridomanic Performance (p.197).14 They set out to perform the Victorian “fern
craze” by creating a series of codified gestures using oversized fan-shaped props.
These were screenprinted with ferns and employed the vibrant color palette of
Marianne North. Questions of plant sexuality and gender also come into particularly
sharp focus in the chapters on Coco de mer, swan plant, buttercup, and strangler
plant. The Coco de mer, once a mythical fruit found floating in the oceans and
13
 originating from the Seychelles, led some Victorians to believe that the Seychelles
were the Garden of Eden and that the giant Coco de mer seed was the biblical
“forbidden” fruit.15 Melanie Jackson’s “Coco Indécent” history of the sea coconut
shows how the sexuality of plants is made obscene and anthropomorphic in
comparison to women’s genitalia (p.160).

郑波, 蕨恋 (录像截屏), 2016, 4K 录像,彩色,有声 17 分钟
Zheng Bo, Pteridophilia (video still), 2016, 4K video, color, sound,
17 minutes. Courtesy of the artist
The painting of plants in preference to the human form has a long history. Manet’s
flower paintings for instance also recall the female body, not decoratively but
monumentally.16 While the genre of flower painting is a modest and humble one
associated with amateurish, or feminine painters, Briony Fer has spoken about
Manet’s flowers as toxic and lethal, like the strangler plants Marianne North was
so fascinated by (p.79). Manet’s application of paint is contaminating, aggressive:
his are provisional, precarious, and triumphant plant portraits, about the failure
of totality. Unlike North’s paintings, Manet’s are airless, artificial interior spaces
with cut flowers. Fer describes them as “breathless or asthmatic” scenes in which
decay is the driving force. For North, painting was also a part of a process of
mourning her father’s death; she wrote “your rose faded before I could paint it”
prior to embarking to document the world of plants in her paintings. Parts of this
book set out to redress the historiography of North, who is typically portrayed
as merely a quaint Victorian plant hunter among dreary botanical illustrators.17

decolonizing the herbarium

The archival intervention by Raqs Media Collective into the British colonial
surveyors mapping India in An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale, together
with the subversive potential of performance in Kew Gardens framed our ideas of
decolonizing colonial collections (pp.118–25). To a space that typically commissions
large-scale responses to plant biology, Botanical Drift added an ephemeral, time-
based, conceptual, written, and performed series of new responses. This was also
a form of institutional activism, initiating collaborations and implanting a group
of artists into the rich troves of economic botany.

Using Kew’s design of a walk-through taxonomy I performed a re-enactment of

the founder of Kew’s naming and classifying of plants (p.47).18 Sir William Hooker,
the first official Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, opened the Museum
of Economic Botany in 1847, now housing the archive of half a decade of letters
sent to him. Among many I focused on the defrocked missionary William Colenso,
who went native in New Zealand. It is the antipodean shadows in taxonomy that
Edouard Manet, Lilacs In A Vase, ca. 1882 provoked the contemporary drift into Victorian botanical history for me, working
Wikimedia Commons closely with the German curator and art historian Petra Lange-Berndt.19

14 B ot a n ic a l Dr i f t Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll 15

 Emma Waltraud Howes, Subcutaneous
“Ha-has” and the Evolution of Polymorphic
Animalcules, Botanical Drift, June 5, 2014.
Photo © Takako Hasegawa
than disentangling this binary, Howes’s Subcutaneous “Ha-has” and the Evolution
of Polymorphic Animalcules (2014) can be seen to address different aspects of
Darwin’s relationship to plants. The choreography, which was performed by
Howes over the course of a day in five acts, compares the transformations of the
human nervous system to plant morphology. The garden architecture of surprise
limits, or ha-has, are internalized in Howes’s research process into movement
taken from plants over the course of her durational performance.

The Curator of Economic Botany at Kew, Mark Nesbitt, together with Caroline
Cornish, has written a history of the collections and their displays at Kew. One might
read this meditation on change as melancholic, because of the transformation from
global scientific and economic power in the nineteenth century to a display of
historical artifacts in the eyes of nostalgic visitors and fanciful artists. An attention
to usefulness and instruction permeates the stated intentions of Hooker, North,
and Kew to this day. While our emphasis is on the drift from botanical classification
to fields outside science, the growing urgency of environmental movements
around the globe makes the ongoing experimentation of artists with plant matter
an appropriation of gardens in social, aesthetic, and poetic botanizing.

Several of the contemporary artists responded to Marianne North’s paintings.

Berlin-based artist Kim Berit Heppelmann took the photograph that Julia Margaret
Cameron made of North as her starting point for a “container” that the Canadian
choreographer Emma Waltraud Howes performed in (p.63). The container
itself was a hybrid overlay in its pattern of North’s pitcher and Datura plants,
the potential romanticism of which was disrupted by references to the post-war
Trümmerfrauen who wore similar white smocks while removing the rubble from
Germany and Austria. Shifting between these images over the course of a day, the
seeming decorum of Heppelmann’s Victorian container at the outset of Botanical
Drift soon gave way to comic amplifications in the process of disrupting the order
of Kew Gardens (p.17).

Basing her choreography on Darwin’s text The Power of Movement in Plants

of 1880, Emma Waltraud Howes’s intervention in Kew highlighted the conflict Emma Waltraud Howes, Subcutaneous “Ha-has” and the Evolution of Polymorphic
between what may be considered to be artistic and what scientific. Yet rather Animalcules, Botanical Drift, June 5, 2014. Photo © Olaf Pascheit

16 B ot a n ic a l Dr i f t Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll 17

1 Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science,
Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World
((New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
2 Michael Marder interprets this passage in the first
chapter—concerning Socrates—of his book dedicating
a chapter each to the panoply of philosophers that
made use of plants. Michael Marder, The Philosopher’s
Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014).
3 Paul Celan, Kew Gardens, trans. Michael
Hamburger, in Selected Poems by Paul Celan
(London: Penguin Classics, 1996); Gaston Bachelard,
Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon, 1958), 201.
4 Mélanie Bouteloup, Anna Colin, Françoise Vergès,
and Serge Volper, Tropicomania: The Social Life of
Plants (Paris: Bétonsalon Center for Art and Research,
April 20–July 21, 2012); http://www.betonsalon.
net/IMG/pdf/tropicomania-publication-web-2.pdf
(accessed June 11, 2017).
5 “The wretched earth” and “botanical conflicts” are
the context for the artworks, theoretical ideas, and
cultivation practices explored in a forthcoming special
issue of Third Text (spring 2018), “The Wretched Earth:
Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions,” ed.
Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh. The premise is that the
earth itself is wretched, as a consequence of enduring
forms of colonialism, including industrial agriculture,
scorched earth policies, and extractive industries.
6 Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye
View of the World (New York: Random House, 2001).
See also Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, “Living Paint,
even After the Death of the Colony,” in Mihnea Mircan
and Vincent W. J. Van Gerven Oei, eds., Allegory of
the Cave Painting (Milan: Mousse, 2015).
7 Sitting with Germaine Greer in Wales at Hay, over
the hours she reiterates the importance of knowing
taxonomy, in the context of a heated debate over
whether or not to intervene in ecosystems during
conservation management. Hay Festival Sustainability
Series, curated by Andy Fryers, June 2017.
8 Chonja Lee, “Ballets botaniques: How Early Film
Makes the Plant Soul Visible in France,” presented at
conference paper, “Vegetal Mediations: Plant Agency
in Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities”,
Central European University, Budapest, May 6, 2017.
9 Cultural studies following Stuart Hall argued that
we human species are all hybrid identities. Hall writes
about cultural hybridity and creolization in various
places including Stuart Hall, in James Donald and Ali
Rattansi, eds., Race, Culture and Difference (London:
Sage, 1992), 252–59. See also H. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry
18 B ot a n ic a l Dr i
and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in
Vegetable Sheep
The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–92.
10 There are many collections and curatorial projects
along these lines at present; for instance Gray and
Sheikh, “The Wretched Earth,” and Maja and Reuben
Fowkes’s conference, “Vegetal Mediations: Plant Agency (Raoulia)
in Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities,”
Central European University, Budapest, May 5–6, 2017.
11 Ágnes Bakk and Bence György Pálinkás, Invasive
Alien?, conference paper, “Vegetal Mediations: Plant
Agency in Contemporary Art and Environmental
Humanities,” Budapest, May 5, 2017.
12 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Caroline Cornish The Life Cycle of a Museum
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian & Mark Nesbitt
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 5–15.
13 Zheng’s video Pteridophilia screening and conference
paper, “Vegetal Mediations,” Budapest, May 6, 2017.
14 Queer ecocritics include: Greta Gaard, Catriona
Sandilands, Nicole Seymour; and titles: Biological
Exuberance; Evolutions Rainbow; Homosexual
Behaviour in Animals. See also Isabel Hoving, Writing
the Earth, Darkly: Globalization, Ecocriticism, and
Desire (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017).
15 James Bridle, The Hyper-Stacks and the Post-
Enlightenment (blog), March 31, 2015; http://booktwo.
org/notebook/hyper-stacks-post-enlightenment
(accessed September 25, 2016).
16 Briony Fer, “Manet Backwards,” University College
London research seminar, January 15, 2015.
17 The 2016 BBC documentary Kew’s Forgotten Queen
by Irene Antoniades is the most recent but also
romanticizing, and thereby flattening, view of North.
I detail this historiography further in an article for
the Third Text special issue, “The Wretched Earth,”
forthcoming 2018.
18 This performance grew from research into
nineteenth-century colonial archives for Art in the
Time of Colony (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). See also
http://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/what-
would-indigenous-taxonomy-look-case-blandowskis-
australia (accessed September 25, 2016). This was
developed in 2016 into Suara Tanaman, experiments
between myself and the composer Mo’ong Santoso
Pribadi, in recording the sound of plants.
19 For other titles with a related interest in animal
studies and actor-network theory see Petra Lange-
Berndt, Animal Art: Präparierte Tiere in der Kunst,
1850–2000 (Munich: Silke Schreiber, 2009); Materiality,
ed. Petra Lange-Berndt (London: Whitechapel Art
Gallery, 2015).
f t Botanical
David Edward Allen was born in Suffolk, UK,
in 1977, and has lived since 1999 in Berlin,
Germany. He is an artist using different
mediums such as sound, video, photography,
and drawing. His work predominantly
revolves around the themes of trees and
the forest. Emphasizing the acts of hunting,
or the felling of trees, Allen uses specific
environments or sets of circumstances as a
means to establish formal structures, all of
which are open to processes of disruption,
randomness, and entropy. Allen’s works
are like traps set to capture moments of
movement, change, failure, and demise. They
reflect on notions of space and landscape,
and contrast wilderness with managed
terrain. He has shown at the Museum of
Installation, London, Kunsthaus Baselland,
Switzerland, and the Akira Ikeda Gallery
and me Collectors room/Olbricht Foundation
in Berlin.
Rebecca Anderson is a curator based in
Sydney, Australia, whose research interests
in economic botany and colonial histories
are informed by her background in history,
photomedia, and museum studies. In 2014,
Rebecca spent two months in Kew’s Economic
Botany Collection conducting research on the
trade and exchange of objects made from
plants and raw plant materials between
Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany and
the Technological Museum in Sydney (now
the Museum of Applied Arts and Science).
Rebecca currently works as a curator for
the City of Sydney.
Bergit Arends is a visual art curator and
researcher. She curated the contemporary
art programme at the Natural History
Museum London from 2005 to 2013, which
included international artists’ residencies,
commissions, and exhibitions. Among
232 B ot a n ic a l D r if t
these exhibitions were: the touring group
show Galápagos (2012); Lucy + Jorge Orta:
Amazonia (2015); After Darwin: Contemporary
Expressions (2009); Mark Dion: Systema
Metropolis (2007); and The Ship: The Art of
Climate Change (2006). Since 2013, she has
been Reid Scholar in the departments of
Geography, and Drama & Theatre at Royal
Holloway, University of London researching
contemporary art and environmental change
in the age of the Anthropocene.
Connie Butler is an artist from the
UK, currently based in Rotterdam, The
Netherlands. Working across painting,
sculpture, performance, and publishing, her
work has been shown in the 21st Century
program at Chisenhale Gallery, London,
Arnolfini Reading Room, Bristol, and Good
Press, Glasgow. A graduate of the Slade
School of Fine Art, University College
London, she is now studying for her MFA
at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.
Maria Buzhor studied philosophy at the Freie
Universität in Berlin and at the Sorbonne
in Paris. Rooted in phenomenology, her
research focuses on epistemological issues
of the body and the relation of expression
and affect in theater. She currently works as
a playwright and dramaturg. As part of the
Berlin-based theater collective Hauen und
Stechen, she works on a reassessment of the
opera genre, confronting it with performance
art and philosophy. Their work is shown at
Sophiensaele Berlin and Théâtre de l’Athénée
in Paris.
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is an
Austrian-Australian artist, art historian,
and Professorial Chair of Global Art at the
University of Birmingham. She is the author
of the books Art in the Time of Colony and
The Importance of Being Anachronistic, and
related exhibitions include Ore Black Ore in
the Allegory of the Cave Painting at Extracity;
Investigated at SAVVY Contemporary Berlin;
Artists in Residence at the Pitt Rivers,
Oxford; Embassy Embassy at Haus der
Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Her installations
and texts have been exhibited at the Venice
Biennale, Marrakech Biennale, and at
Sehnsucht during Frieze 2017. She has done
performances and plays at the Institute
of Contemporary Art London, Pesta Bonka
Festival Indonesia, and Konzert Theater
Bern. She received her PhD from Harvard
University, is an editor of the journal Third
Text, and was a recipient of fellowships
from the British Academy, Sackler-Caird,
and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung.
Caroline Cornish is a research fellow
at Royal Holloway, University of London,
and principal researcher on the Mobile
Museum research project, a collaborative
undertaking between Royal Holloway
and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Her
research interests lie at the intersection
of history of science, history of museums,
and history of collections.
Sunoj D was born in Kerala and studied
painting and printmaking in Bangalore,
where he now lives. Sunoj’s work depicts
the relationship with the land and how this
is changing, with a focus on agriculture,
inspired by growing up on farmland on which
his grandfather depended for his livelihood.
His solo shows include A Forgotten Carpentry
Lesson and a Love Song (2013) and Sunoj D—
not dead since 1979 (2005) in Galleryske,
Bangalore, and Between Land and Sky (2009)
in Grosvenor Vadehra, London. Sunoj has also
been involved in various international group
shows, projects, and artist residences.
Biographies
herman de vries is a Dutch artist born
in 1931. He was trained as a biologist
and naturalist and brings this experience
in horticulture and natural science to
his art practice that uses “nature” as
its material. He was part of the “Zero”
movement in the 1960s and represented
The Netherlands in the 2015 Venice
Biennale. He typically stylizes his name
in lower-case as herman de vries on
his artwork “to avoid hierarchy.”
Alfred Döblin was one of the major figures
of German-Jewish literary modernism
(August 10, 1878–June 26, 1957), best known
for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929).
His works (A People Betrayed: November
1918: A German Revolution, Die Zeitlupe,
Der unsterbliche Mensch, Amazonas-
Trilogie, Das Ich über der Natur, etc.) cover
a variety of genres ranging from historical
novels to drama, from science fiction to
travel accounts, and from true crimes to
philosophical essays. He was a doctor
who specialized in nervous disorders.
Hazel Dowling often works with the process
of staging and re-presenting historical
material, such as dance manuals and
documentation of narratives embedded in
given localities. When asking others to
reconsider this material with her, she looks
to the historical role of the amateur and
the enthusiast and their political potency.
The layering of sets of movements within
a specific context —– such as agricultural
landscapes, a military parade ground,
or collective farming environments —– has
been central to her work. She is currently
researching techniques of the body that
include Butoh dance traditions, Rudolf
Laban’s early choreography, and Irish
clog dancing.
233
Natasha Eaton is Reader in the History of Art
at University College London. Her research
focuses primarily on British and Indian art,
notions of cross-cultural exchange and
material culture. Currently she is working
on several projects —– art and indenture in
the Indian Ocean; collecting and empire; the
agency of light in empire. She has published
two monographs —– Mimesis across Empires:
Artworks and Networks in India, 1765-1860
(Duke University Press, 2013) and Colour, Art
and Empire: Visual Culture and the Nomadism
of Representation (I.B. Tauris, 2013). She
is under contract from Routledge to write
a monograph on colonialism, tourism, and
collecting —– provisionally entitled Vertiginous
Exchange. Eaton has published in many
peer-reviewed journals including The Art
Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, and Cultural
Critique. She has been an advisor to and is
currently an editor of the journal Third Text.
Germaine Greer is a writer, broadcaster, and
conservationist. In 1998, she was appointed
Professor of English and Comparative Studies
at the University of Warwick. She is a Bye-
Fellow of Newnham College Cambridge. She
worked as a lecturer at Warwick from 1968
to 1973, during which time she published
her first, and most famous, work, The Female
Eunuch (1970). Her other books include
White Beech: The Rainforest Years (2013),
The Whole Woman (1999), The Beautiful Boy
(2003), and The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes
of Women Painters and Their Work (2001).
Takako Hasegawa is an artist, architect,
and photographer. She has collaborated
with many dancers, engaged in various
choreographic projects, and has also been
generating cross-disciplinary conversations
by hosting symposiums and events involving
leading figures from art, architecture, dance,
234 B ot a n ic a l D r if t
and theater. She has presented her papers
and exhibited her works at the Architectural
Association School of Architecture, Royal
Academy of Arts, Camden Arts Centre, Crafts
Council, Chelsea College of Arts, Bauhaus
Dessau, and Beirut Arab University amongst
others. As a photographer, she “dances”
with the camera, capturing fluid moments
and bodies in motion.
Kim Berit Heppelmann works at the
thresholds between fashion, art, and
philosophy. The basis of her collections
always forms an artistically and technically
sophisticated concept that she wants to
implement by using the “one-piece-method”
that she developed herself, out of the
basic principles of Minimalism. She creates
her garments from one single piece of
fabric. The experimental exploration of
the tension of body, outer shell, movement,
and space forms the heart of her work.
This interdependence is what challenges
her to reflect on the basic principles of
clothing as sculpture, performance, image,
text, and emotion.
Emma Waltraud Howes is a dancer and
choreographer working within the framework
of a conceptual art practice with a focus on
performance, sculpture, sound, and various
2-D media. She originally employed scientific
research methods to explore the problematic
relation found in mind-body dualisms,
a process that encouraged her to invert
the common understanding of scientific
objectification by producing a subjective
means for understanding the constants and
variables of human experience. Her current
work is guided by observations on gestures
with a focus on the development of an
expanded contemporary choreographic
practice, projects that manifest as multiple
reconfigurations of the body and space. The
corporeal characters and material objects
in these works can be seen as empathetic
subjects that avail themselves toward a
reconciliation of dichotomies through live
performance and interdisciplinary instal-
lations. Howes received a grant from the
Quebec Studio of Künstlerhaus Bethanien
(Berlin) 2014, and participated in numerous
exhibitions and presentations such as
Motion. Montreal/Geneva, at Galerie de
L’UQAM, Montreal in 2016.
Melanie Jackson is an artist working on
an ongoing interrogation of mutability and
transformation. Drawing on the intimacies of
knowledge at the nanoscale to the specter
of gargantuan monstrosities, there is an
intrigue in the primordial to the yet-to-be-
created. The ways that objects influence,
socialize, or empower us are pursued to
kaleidoscopic effect through sculpture,
comic book sequences, and moving image
works. Jackson collaborated with writer
Esther Leslie on two publications, The
Urpflanze and The Ur-phenomenon. She
participated in numerous exhibitions such
as The Global Contemporary Art Worlds
after 1989, ZKM (Center for Art and Media)
Karlsruhe in 2012 and the two-part solo
exhibition in conjunction with The Urpflanze
in London (2013).
Alana Jelinek has been a practicing artist
for thirty years working in a variety of
media including novel writing, painting, site-
specific intervention, curating, performance,
and participatory events. One durational
participatory project has been The Field
(2008–17) located in five hectares of grass
and woodland near Stansted airport, Essex,
UK. The Field explored Levinasian ethics —–  carrying out ethnographic research on the
ethical engagements with the other as
Biographies
Other, and this included both the human
and the non-human other. Jelinek has a
PhD from Oxford Brookes University in
“Art as a Democratic Act” and has been
working since 2009 as an artist on two
consecutive postdoctoral research projects
with the Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology, University of Cambridge,
exploring contemporary legacies of the
European colonial project. In addition
to creating artworks such as Tall Stories:
Cannibal Forks (2010), The Fork’s Tale,
as narrated by itself (2013), and Knowing
(2016), she has written a theoretical
work, This Is Not Art (2013) describing
the vital role art plays in democracy.
Philip Kerrigan is a freelance art, garden,
and plant historian with a particular interest
in the overlaps between science, the
arts, and philosophy. He completed a PhD
in the Department of History of Art at the
University of York in 2009 and has stayed
on helping to advance new interdisciplinary
research projects plus innovative forms of
public engagement with science through the
arts. He has authored several articles but
this is his first contribution to a book. He
also has an interest in human biology and
health and is co-editing a new volume of
essays and images on mental health.
Kay Evelina Lewis-Jones is an Economic
and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded
PhD student at the University of Kent’s
School of Anthropology and Conservation.
She studied social anthropology at the
London School of Economics and has a
Masters in ethnobotany from the University
of Kent and the Royal Botanic Gardens,
Kew. For the last three years, she has been
Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, tracing
235
the process of wild seed conservation from
the field through to the laboratory and out
again. Her research has taken her to the
Republic of Georgia, the Sussex Weald, the
Sonoran Desert, and the Tallgrass Prairies,
studying the human-plant relationships
in this global network of seed banks and
exploring what it means to be a wild seed
in the Anthropocene: A journey that, despite
its witnessing of loss and precarity, was
made inspiring and hopeful thanks to her
botanical stewards —– both human and plant.
This research was made possible by funding
granted by ESRC, UK, and the support
and collaboration of the Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew, and the Millennium Seed
Bank Partnership.
Claire Loussouarn is a social anthropologist,
filmmaker, and movement practitioner. She
studied at Goldsmiths where she completed
her doctoral thesis on Chinese gambling
in London and was a research fellow there
for three years during which time she
carried out further research on risk-taking
in financial trading. In 2014, Loussouarn
turned to filmmaking to co-direct and film a
feature documentary Inside The Dance (2017),
which looks at an improvised form of partner
dancing which is practiced by Americans on
the West Coast. She is currently editing a
feature-length documentary about New York
female boxers, Unstoppable, in collaboration
with anthropologist Jesse Weaver Shipley.
She teaches a visual anthropology short
course at Goldsmiths College and practices
various forms of movement improvisation.
Wietske Maas is a cultural worker and
an artist researching urban food ecologies.
Based in Amsterdam since 2005, Maas
combines artistic pursuits with work as
a producer and curator for the European
236 B ot a n ic a l Dr if t
Cultural Foundation and as researcher,
project manager, and managing editor
for the concluding phase of Former West
(2014–16). In 2007, she coined the term
“urbanibalism” and started developing with
Matteo Pasquinelli the eponymous project
urbanibalism, which picks a bone with
the binary morality that casts nature and
culture into separate ecologies. It seeks
instead a newfound materialist ethics for
the city, using cultural tools to explore
the urban as a messy site of digestions
between people, institutions, other life
forms, and non-organic matter.
Natasha Myers is Associate Professor in
the Department of Anthropology at York
University. Her ethnographic research
examines forms of life in the contemporary
arts and sciences. Her first book, Rendering
Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and
Excitable Matter (Duke, 2015) won the 2016
Robert K. Merton Prize from the Science,
Knowledge, and Technology Section of the
American Sociological Association. She is
the Convenor of the Politics of Evidence
Working Group, Director of the Plant Studies
Collaboratory, co-organizer of Toronto’s
Technoscience Salon, and co-founder of the
Write2Know Project. Her current projects
span investigations of the arts and sciences
of vegetal sensing and sentience, the politics
and aesthetics of garden enclosures in a
time of climate change, and, most recently,
she has launched a long-term ethnography
experimenting with the arts of ecological
attention in High Park’s Oak Savannah.
Mark Nesbitt is curator of the Economic
Botany Collection at the Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew. First trained in agricultural
botany at the University of Reading, he
moved into archaeological science via
a PhD at University College London, and then
into ethnobotany and museum research. His
research interests are focused on human-
plant relationships and include botany and
empire, and the histories of plant fibers
and medicinal plants. He co-edited Curating
Biocultural Collections (2014), which won
the Royal Society of Biology’s award for
Best Postgraduate Textbook, and is active
in networking with and reviving biocultural
collections worldwide.
Olaf Pascheit is an art historian and
freelance photographer. He is lecturer
at Freie Kunstschule Hamburg, FIU (Free
International University), at the Leuphana
Universität Lüneburg (2008–10). Pascheit’s
photographic reports on artists, the
processes of making, and the installation
of exhibitions include Richard Serra, Jannis
Kounellis, Franz Erhard Walther, Lili Fischer,
Gregor Schneider, and Mark Dion. He also
creates photo essays of specific social
spaces and cultural landscapes. Pascheit
has collaborated on exhibitions (A World of
Wild Doubt, Hamburg, 2013 / Sigmar Polke:
Wir Kleinbürger!, Hamburg, 2009 et al.) as
well as in art programs dealing with public
space (Politische Landschaft / Political
Landscape, Graz, 2015). He has been
commissioned to document large-scale
events such as “Deutscher Historikertag”
2016 /  250 Jahre Kunstakademie Dresden,
2014. He works for Bucerius Kunst Forum
and Hamburger Kunsthalle as both a
freelance art historian and a photographer.
Matteo Pasquinelli is a philosopher and
Professor in Media Theory at the University
of Arts and Design, Karlsruhe. Previously,
he taughtMedia Studies at the Pratt Institute,
New York. He wrote the book Animal Spirits:
A Bestiary of the Commons (2008) and
Biographies
edited the anthology Alleys of Your Mind:
Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas
(2015) among others. He lectures at the
intersection of political philosophy, media
theory, and cognitive sciences in universities
and art institutions. Together with Wietske
Maas, he wrote the Manifesto of Urban
Cannibalism. In 2014, at NGBK and Akademie
der Künste Berlin he co-curated the
exhibition The Ultimate Capital Is the Sun,
the symposium The Metabolism of the Social
Brain, and contributed to the exhibition and
catalog of Nervous Systems at HKW (Haus
der Kulturen der Welt Berlin) in 2016.
Raqs Media Collective enjoys playing a
plurality of roles, often appearing as artists,
occasionally as curators, sometimes as
philosophical agent provocateurs. They
make contemporary art, have made films,
curated exhibitions, edited books, staged
events, collaborated with architects,
computer programmers, writers, and theater
directors, and have founded processes that
have left deep impacts on contemporary
culture in India. Raqs (pron. rux) follows
its self-declared imperative of “kinetic
contemplation” to produce a trajectory
that is restless in terms of the forms and
methods that it deploys even as it achieves
a consistency of speculative procedures. The
Raqs Media Collective is based in New Delhi
and was founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi,
Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta.
237
acknowledgments Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
To nourishment from the plants—that we are only able as humans to apprehend
Botanical Drift:
as simple parts of a more complex system—I have been guided by Charlotte von Protagonists of the Invasive Herbarium
Zinnenburg, Christoph Balzar, and of course the individual plants themselves, too
numerous, anonymous, and oblivious for acknowledgment here. Published by Sternberg Press
Chapters by Germaine Greer, Caroline Cornish &
Mark Nesbitt is one of those rare curators and scholars who see the collections and Mark Nesbitt, Emma Waltraud Howes, Kim Berit
knowledge they keep as a public good and share it generously and affectionately. He Heppelmann, Claire Loussouarn, Natasha Myers,
gave us his materials and time, archives and deep botanical expertise and collaboration Philip Kerrigan, Alana Jelinek, Khadija von
Zinnenburg Carroll, Rebecca Anderson, Bergit Arends
with Petra Lange-Berndt guided the selection of contributors and chapters. The project
& Sunoj D, Kay Evelina Lewis-Jones, Natasha Eaton,
that is now this book was born from a desire to work with Mark Nesbitt in Kew and Raqs Media Collective, Connie Butler & Hazel
Petra Lange-Berndt. Without them this project would not exist, we came up with the Dowling, Melanie Jackson, Alfred Döblin, Wietske
idea one night at Pembroke College Cambridge, to whom I’m endlessly grateful for Maas, herman de vries, Matteo Pasquinelli, Maria
Buzhor, David Edward Allen, and photographs
an interdisciplinary context in which to think of new projects. I am indebted to Toby by Olaf Pascheit and Takako Hasegawa.
Matthiesen for giving his space, and garden terrace in London, during the preparation
of this book. Editor: Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
Associate Editor: Petra Lange-Berndt
Editorial Assistance: Isabelle Lindermann
Many contributors gave their support beyond the submission of a chapter—Claire Copyediting: Kate Lindesay
Loussouarn, Natasha Eaton, and Rebecca Anderson in particular. Natasha Myers’s Proofreading: Joanna Chisholm
Plant Studies Collaboratory at York University in Canada, which invited me to Research Assistance: Katrine Mortensen
Design: A Practice for Everyday Life
present the beginnings of the book, was a most vibrant group of people interested
Typeset in Mercury Text and Gravur Condensed
in plant studies. Likewise, the conference Vegetal Mediations, organized by Rueben Printed by Graphius
and Maya Fowkes, curated a large group of artists working with ecology. I also
received input on Marianne North and William Colenso from Shela Sheikh, Irene pp.1 & 2: Emma Waltraud Howes, Subcutaneous "Ha-has"
and the Evolution of Polymorphic Animalcules,
Antoniades, and Damian Skinner. Botanical Drift, 5 June 2014. Photo © Takako Hasegawa
pp.9, 22–28, 32, 42-45, 62-63, 76, 79, 80, 90, 93
Johanes Santoso Pribadi’s search for the sound of plants and for their portraits (top) and 128: © Board of Trustees of the Royal
Botanic Gardens, Kew
by Gilang Nuari was an enriching offshoot of the actual drift we did in London in
p.240: Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Flumenpresse
2014. For that event, Petra Lange-Berndt cooked a memorable feast based on plants Tumatakuru (Snottygobbles), acrylic on teak wood
in Joseph Banks’s journals. Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli distilled plants board, 2017
into cocktails, and conversations with them about Urbanibalism was an important
ingredient in seeding this project. For the production costs of this book and the
time to make it I am grateful for the fellowship I received from the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation.
The editor would like to thank the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation for their financial support and
the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens,
Kew, University College London, the State Library of
Queensland, Raqs Media Collective, Melanie Jackson,
David Edward Allen, Alana Jelinek, Olaf Pascheit,
Bo Zheng, Takako Hasegawa, Bergit Arends, Sunoj D,
the New York Public Library, Wikimedia Commons,
Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Yu Hun, Connie
Butler & Hazel Dowling, and Kessinger Publishing
for the donation of images.
© 2017 Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Sternberg Press.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
All rights are reserved. Apart from any use permitted
under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be
reproduced in this publication by print, photocopy,
or any other means, without written permission from
the publisher.
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright
holders of the works reproduced. The publisher
apologies for any omissions that may have been
inadvertently made.
ISBN 978-3-95679-353-0
Sternberg Press
Caroline Schneider
Karl-Marx-Allee 78
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www.sternberg-press.com
B ot a n ic a l