Empire: World History - 223. Empire of Plants: From Kew Gardens to Botany Bay

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Kew Gardens near London is one of the most famous botanical gardens in the world, welcoming countless visitors every year. But what many visitors may not know is that the history of Kew and that of the British Empire are intimately intertwined… At the height of the empire, Queen Victoria visited the iconic glass Palm House six times in the first few weeks it opened, and palm houseplants became a proud symbol because of her patronage. The botanical gardens also served as a laboratory that allowed imperial industries to boom. For example, seeds collected by Kew gardeners developed rubber plants that were shipped around the empire. The rubber plantations in British Malaya became so valuable that Britain fought a bloody war in 1948 to keep them. Listen as Anita and William are joined by Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireworld, to discuss how Kew was instrumental to the empire. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. And it is up to me to congratulate my co-host of becoming Prime Minister of Canada. Can I just say how much? you have absolutely eaten my time this week. So for those of you who don't know, what a jolly chafester, William Durham Paul is. He literally ruined my week. So there is, can I just clarify,

notes and clarifications right at the top of the programme. I am not in the running to be Prime Minister of Canada. I have never been the Defence Secretary of Canada, nor have I been the President of the Board of Trade. Can I just say, this is hilarious to you. But, William did a congratulations because there is an Anita Arnan, who actually I know, who is in the shortlist to become the new Prime Minister of Canada. The new Justin Trudeau. And William very helpfully congratulated me. And Twitter and other various social media silos went mental. And I have been fielding messages for such a long time asking whether this might be a conflict of interest with my job at the BBC.

I mean, it's not me. He was joking. I've been telling people that when you're in office, you'll still find time, given your skills in multitasking. Yes, I know you did. I did also notice, with great mirth, that you nominated yourself as Foreign Secretary. I thought I'd be very good. Foreign Secretary. And it was only a matter of time before you'd ask me.

Oh, my God. And people still, even after you said, the most ridiculous thing anyone could ever say, still believed it. And I'm still coming up, like little DM, slipping into my DMs going, really? but you've done such a terrible job or you've always supported you. It's like, no. It's a William, it's a Dalrymple thing. It isn't true. So it's not me. So glad to have clarified that right at the top of the programme. I'm still holding out for office for you, Anita. One of these days. Greatness calls. Somebody did say, why don't you become president of an independent Scotland? Which that yielded a conversation which you quickly pulled in Hamza Yusuf and Humberus for your campaign. I thought Hamsa should

be consulted on this. Direct atting, Humsa Yusuf. Anyway, shall we get on with what we're here to talk about? We should. Thank you for all your kind of comments about the Mughal series. We really enjoyed doing it and glad you enjoyed it too. But we're taking a departure now because we're taking a stroll around the garden. That's what we're going to do.

A little mini series for your delectation and delight. But this is, you know, why? Why are you talking about gardens? Why? This is no just Monty Don or Alan Titmarsh garden. This is a fancy garden. Did you say titmarsh? We really have to talk about your pronunciation before we go on. Titchmarsh, feral and latitude. Let's repeat up to me. It is not titmash. It is not latitude and it is so not feral.

So look, it's, okay, just try, you know, anyway, look, it's not that. It's not that. This is because botany is such an integral part of empire that we thought it was very, very important. to talk about it, and especially because we've got a special guest who I'm going to sort of hide away just for a little while longer. But we'll tell you in a minute who that is. Just come for a walk with us around the garden, because where are we starting here? We're going to start with the royals. So this is where we go back to, William. Exactly. And it's the story of where botanic gardens come from. The focus of this series is going to be the way that botanic gardens became collections of imperial plants, the way that Empire pulled in, within it, examples of botany from across the world and how that botany was exploited in the building of empire. But looking at the roots of it, it starts with royal gardens on one hand and

physic gardens on the other. Have you ever been to the Chelsea Physic Garden? I have been to the Chelsea Physic Garden. So these are what, the royals vying with each other to, you know, show how very international they were, how very plugged in they were. And, you know, not just in Britain, but in Padua and across Europe. They are places known for their follies and temples, their pagodas. Some reason, the garden has always attracted this idea of, as well as pulling in plants from across the globe, pulling in different kinds of architecture with it. Well, we're talking back as far as the 1500s. I mean, the Padua Garden that you mentioned is 1545. You've got Hampton Court as well. And largely, in the medieval period, it's the Arabs who are.

credited with bringing this sort of east to west transition and style and desire for plants that are exotic. I mean, they bring citrus fruits, melons, mulberry trees, cotton, sugar. And at the same time, they're expanding their spice trade that we're talking about as well. These plants arrive in the Arab world from further east still. A lot of these plants come from Malaysia and Malacca Straits and the Arabs are instrumental in bringing them from India, into the Arrow World and then through to Spain and Europe. So they have long histories of movement before the Europeans get in on the act. But it is European Empire builders who take it a whole new stage.

One could say they make it biblical because a lot of the early collectors fantasize about reconstructing the Garden of Eden, you know, that they are going to get the most beauteous, the most exotic flowers that might have been carried on Noah's Ark. And there is this, I mean, you can say a tsunami of new plants that hit Europe. as a result of this. The thing is that you've got all these plants coming in and then it becomes a question of how do you classify them and then you've got to mention Linnaeus in this. Tell us about why Linnaeus is so very important and it's also the springboard to the desire to get more and to fill in the gaps in the classification. Well, as plants start pouring into Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries as people bring them back from their imperial wanderings,

there is an increasing chaos as people haven't got any means of of classifying or ordering them. And Linnaeus proposes an entirely new basis for classifying plants, one that uses, I think it's called the sexual method of classification.

Because plants reproduce sexually, they should be classified by a single feature, the number and arrangement of their male stamens and female pistols, is the phrase. So he comes up with 24 classes, subdivided into orders and families and generates a system of classification that can include all plants from all over

the world using this method. And botanists take this challenge up and begin to add to Linnaeus' system. And at the same time as this is happening, the Dutch are experimenting with exotics in Cape Town in 1694, followed by the French who established Pampal Muses on Mauritius in 1735, the British. British have a botanical garden on St Vincent in the West Indies by 1764. And when Queen Victoria ascends the throne in 1837, there are about 10 active British botanical gardens. And by her death in 2001, that's grown to 126. Yeah. And in that British period, this is what we're focusing on today because our very, very special guest is Sattnamsangera, author of Empire World,

how British imperialism has shaped the world. Welcome. I bet you thought we'd never get to you, Sunna. I enjoyed it. I listened to your podcast more than I listen to my mother. Oh. I'm very used to it. Mrs. Sangero, we apologise, but we're delighted secretly.

After that copy of it, we should point out that Sutnab's wonderful book, which has won a whole variety, rich variety of literary awards, is out in paperbacks, Adam. That's right. Yeah, I think people know about Empire Land a lot, but I don't think people realise I've written a sequel, which is about how the British Empire shaped the world more than Britain. So thank you for the plug. Not at all, not at all. And it is because it is so interesting. It's a sort of international

look, you know, from in to out, is so fascinating. You heard William talking about some of the raw botanic gardens that were created around the world or these, you know, places where these exotic things could be gathered. But when we think about botanic gardens and Britain, our mind immediately turns to places like Q Gardens, which is a really central part of this imperial dream, if you like. Yeah, I mean, it's not something that I particularly saw as imperial. I think the most imperial thing about Q for me, before I started researching it, was that a lot of Asians live nearby, and actually you two live quite close.

I think both of you are quite close to Q Gardens. But I would no more have viewed British Empire through the Prism of Plants than viewing it through the prism of, you know, PlayStation's or shoebuckles. But it turns out it's a massive branch of the British Empire. And actually something you crucially need to mention in relation to Carl Linnaeus is that not only did botany shaped colonialism, a colonialism shaped botany in that Linnaeus in his system of plants

included human beings, crucially. And he put them into four groups based on their geographic origin and skin color. and he said that the Europeans were acute and inventive and governed by laws. And crucially, he said that the Africans were, quote, crafty, indolent, negligent, and governed by caprice. He sounds like Ellen Musk. Well, yeah, exactly. It was a deeply racist.

And actually, until the early 90s, common plant names, which is a different system to lineases, included the N-word, were used frequently. And phrases like Jewbush and Kaffir plums, deeply racist language. And it just goes to show you how imperialism and botany are just totally linked together, and it all comes together at Q. And let's talk about some of the characters who are also really very important at this time. Now, we've sort of touched on Joseph Banks and the Joseph Banks building, which carries his name. We had a big session on Joseph Banks during our Endeavour. Endeavour and Cook, indeed.

It's the single episode which had more complaints than any other in our entire series, We did it after our Christmas lunch. And even more than usual, talked over each other. Yes, yes, it's true. It's true. But let's do it with some order now. So, Satham, tell us a little bit about Joseph Banks. A little pen portrait would be really good.

Who was he, and why is the important? Yeah, Joseph Banks, you know, famously went on Captain James Cook's journey to the South Pacific on the Endeavour. That sparked British colonisation of the region. The places they visited, it sounds like an amazing luxury cruise, doesn't it? Madeira, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Horn, New Zealand, Tahiti. And he was from a very posh family, a very wealthy family. And he basically bought his way onto that trip. He contributed £10,000, which is nearly £1.5 million.

The king, King George III, only gave £4,000. And it goes to show you, it was equivalent of a very rich person, you know, buying a seat on a spacecraft. Exactly what I was thinking, yes, I knew. Or to the bottom of the, to see the town. Titanic, right? But he was obsessed with botany, although he wasn't a trained scientist. He'd been obsessed with botany since a kid. There's quite a strange story involving Toads at the time when he was growing up. Toads were thought to cause warts, but he knew they didn't cause warts. So he had a party trick where he would rubber toad against his face and shock everyone around. But as he got more older, he got more serious about botany, he went to Oxford. Hang on, you haven't missed out the bit where one of the frogs jumped into his mouth, didn't it? Is that right? I didn't know that.

This was a story which I read in Peter Moore's wonderful book, Endeavour. And in the course of doing that party trick of rubbing the frog against his face, one frog didn't get as far as his face, it just jumped into his mouth. Right. Was it a frog or a toad? I think it was toads, wasn't it? It was warty toads. Yes, that's right. He must have had a big mouth. Toads are little. Joseph Banks, you're amateur, but passionate and very, very rich botanist. I mean, his dad was an MP, so he came from, you know, money.

and power. He buys his way onto Cook's voyage. Does he do good work while he's on the voyage? What does he do and what does he see and what does he collect? Well, crucially, he brought along with him two expert botanists. It often gets forgotten. Daniel Salander and Herman Sporing, who probably knew more than he did, but he did amazing work. They were drawing too, weren't they? They were doing these very beautiful illustrations of the plants that they found. Yeah, and he collected 30,000 But also crucially, when they landed in Australia, Cook initially nicknamed the area where they landed Stingray Harbour. But because Banks collected so many plants, they renamed it famously Botany Bay. Also, he was the first European to sight a kangaroo.

Is that right? Is that right? And one of the ships' dogs, a greyhound, tried to outrun this creature famously. The botany thing is really important, but also with Banks. Do we have him to thank for subsequent deportations of criminals to Australia? Because doesn't he say, this is perfect. You've got cowardly natives and it'll be fine here. Yeah, he did loads of things like that.

But yeah, that was one of his many ideas. But when he came back from this journey, he became hugely famous. He joined the Royal Society. He started advising the East India Company on how to grow Chinese hemp in Britain. He lobbied for the government to choose Botany Bay as a, penal colony for these prisoners because the extremely cowardly natives would not cause a problem. But also, crucially, this royal garden, which was basically a hobby at Q, he became an advisor to the king and helped to turn it into something much more serious. And another initiative he was

involved in was the breadfruit project. So when he was in Tahiti, he came across the breadfruit. I don't know if you've ever eaten it or seen it. It's a very fleshy kind of fruit. And he thought it was a brilliant solution to the challenge of feeding large numbers of enslaved people. The way he saw it, it wasn't cost-effective to be importing food from North America. And also, he didn't think we should encourage the enslaved to grow their own food because that would stop them working. So he thought, let's set up breadfruit plantation, because this is an amazing fruit. And that actually led to one of the most famous mutinies in history. The Mutiny in the Bounty. Mutanty in the bounty. There's five films on the subject. But this is all part of his project.

to try to set up breadfruit plantations in the Caribbean. Saddam, this is all after Georgia Third has gone mad in Q. Isn't that right? George III was kept in Q when he was insane. And that's where he had all these sort of very painful treatments to try and bring him back to his senses. Yeah, and also I think there were two palaces, there was Richmond and there was Q,

and they ended up being part of the same thing. But what Banks crucially hadn't considered was whether the enslaved even once. wanted to eat breadfruit. And it turned out they didn't and they resisted it. And this is very important because we often don't, we don't have records of how the enslaved felt about so many things. But the evidence suggests that actually they saw it. They didn't like breadfruit. They didn't like it and they saw it as fit only for feeding pigs. But breadfruit is now part of the Jamaican diet. And that really does suggest that there was willful resistance

to the slave-owning class to Joseph Banks' project. something that the historian B.W. Higman has written about, and it's a very important aspect of the breadfruit story. Well, I mean, the Joseph Banks building today now at Q is home to a collection from the Economic Botany Department. I mean, just first of all, what is economic botany? Economic botany was the Museum of Economic Botany, and this was set up in 1847 by a successor to Joseph Banks, a man called Sir William Hooker. He and his son pretty much ran Q. gardens during its early years. And it's very controversial that it's named after Joseph Banks, because obviously he's a man who's considered to have enabled enslavement. But the idea of the

Museum of Economic Botany was to encourage investment in homegrown innovation in plants. We've lost the idea that plants are technology, but, you know, in 1853, three quarters of the total value of British imports were, quote, articles of vegetable origin. This was crucial to imperial trade. And William Hooker wanted to encourage people to think of ways in which of using plants in innovative, business-like ways. Give us some examples, Sattlam, the sort of thing you're talking about, what plant imports were crucial to Britain's economy. Yeah, so you'd go to the Museum of Econabot Botany and you'd see a palm, for example. You'd see how it has been fashioned into a walking stick.

And it would show you how, actually, how important palm was to wood. You'd also see one of the biggest items in the collection at the moment, I think 10% of the collection is Sinchona plants. I think you're covering that in another episode, but Sinchona is the bark that produced quinine, which in turn enabled Europeans to survive in West Africa, which in turn enabled the colonization of West Africa and led to the creation of an entire country, Nigeria. And, you know, the survival rate of a European in Mali in the early 19th century, was something like, I think you would survive for one third of the year, if you were lucky. You had an annual mortality rate of 300%.

But suddenly you've got cinchona, you've got quinine, and you're still going to get sick, but you can survive. Right. And this guy, I mean, you were saying Joseph Hooker sort of takes over where Banks leaves off. And his is very much an imperial agenda. He thinks, you know what, we go, we collect, but we also, does he say take over? or we claim land? I mean, does he say it as explicitly as that?

I think he's focused specifically about the plants, and he realizes, you know, you've got sugar, you've got tea, you've got cinchona, you've got rubber, you've got these industries. Plants can change the world indirectly, and there's now a collection of around 100,000 objects in that economic botany building. And it actually led to copycat museums in all sorts of places.

There was one in Missouri, there's one in Adelaide, there was one in Edinburgh and Hamburg. It was a hugely popular idea. We forget that, you know, sugar, the sugar plantations, were a botanical exercise, you know, of trial and error. And also Britain sent one million indentured laborers around the world to run plantations, to work on sugar plantations, Chinchona plantations, indigo plantations.

And these were all botanical processes. And also when these plantations failed, like when Barbados was overfarmed, when the soil failed. Those were botanical processes to revive the soil. Famously, the soil in Barbados was so bad that they tried to import new soil from another colony in a boat. It didn't work. But all of these processes were botanical. And also the legacies are botanical.

One of my favorite facts about the British Empire is that, you know, Ganges, which is one of the most famous things associated with Jamaica, is so intrinsically Jamaican. but actually was brought to Jamaica by Indian indentured labourers. Ganges is a Hindi word. It's a Hindi crop. But so much about British colonialism and colonialism in general was actually botanical. You know, I'm actually really struck by that.

When you were saying breadfruit now is part of the staple of the Jamaican diet, detested at first and having a horrible history behind it. But, you know, anyone tucking into a curry this week, the chili, the heat in your curry is also a gift. of Portuguese colonialism. You know, the Portuguese who came to India who had brought boatloads of the stuff for trade from South America, that is where that came from. You know, Indians didn't have heat before. Yeah, the Columbian Exchange famously. But also, you've got another building at Q, which symbolizes the palm house. It's probably the most famous building, right? 16,000 glass

planes. It's a gorgeous building. I mean, people who haven't seen it, it is like looking into an enormous glass palace. It is how many paints of glass? You just said it and I spoke over it. 16,000. And originally the glass was green, literally a greenhouse. Greenhouses were green. I never knew that. I mean, it was literally green. Yeah. And we forget, we just think, oh, it's a nice place to see some pretty plants. But actually, Palm in the 19th century was a massively important industrial product. You know, it produced wood, wax, oil, fiber, starch, alcohol and sugar. And, you know, The palm house was a celebration of this. Also, for many visitors, when it opened in 1848, it was an insight into the British Empire because a lot of the plants, most of them, came from the Calcutta

Botanic Garden. This is very much the thought at the time, so this is Albert wanting to show the world how great his wife, Victoria's and her empire. And, you know, the great exhibition 1852 around the same time is exactly an attempt to show, look, we have dominion over so much of the world and this is what we bring back to show you because you'll never go to see it so we bring it here for you to enjoy it. I remember meeting someone who was coming to do a BBC training course from I think Papua New Guinea and he arrives in London in January I think in the middle of winter and of course he absolutely hates it. He thinks it's incredibly cold and incredibly miserable. And then a mutual friend of ours, Anita, takes him to Q Gardens and thereafter he spends his

weekends in the palm house and just sits in there because it's the only place in London that feels like home. Well, he's not alone. The other person who loved the palm house was Queen Victoria. She visited it three times in six weeks when it opened in 1848. And she, of course, she famously never visited the empire. So it was the closest you could say she ever got to India. And a lot of people visited it to get a taste of what it was like to be in India. Yes, it must have been so odd, actually. You know, the only experience she had was, were plates of glass and the plants that grew onto them and what was served on her plate, you know, famously adoring curries and, you know, the hotter the better. She was delighted

by all of that. We're going to take a break. Join us after the break where I do want to talk, and we've got so many things to talk about, but I want to talk about Mariana North. There is a Mariana North Gallery at Q. And I'm quite keen because I really don't know who she was. Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about, well, who knew? Greenhouses were green. I just genuinely thought it was because of plants were green. I didn't know it was because the glass was green. I mentioned a name, Mariana North. There is a Mariana North gallery at Q. Who was she? And why does she get a gallery? Mariana North was this intrepid female artist. And a bit like Joseph Banks, she inherited fortune

from her father. And then she rejected the small life expected of her and chose instead to roam the world and painting landscapes and the people she encountered. And there's a Marianna North gallery. And in an act of solipsism, she actually set it up herself. In 1879, she persuaded the Q's director, Joseph Hooker, that she would fund the new gallery on condition that it would display her uvra. So now it contains around 800 paintings by her. And they're very interesting paintings. They're very unlike the East India Company paintings of plants. They're quite garish. Oh, they're like fantasy paintings that you'd expect in Lewis Carroll, where, you know, Alice has been shrunk and is surrounded by these giant, vibrant plants. That's the kind of thing. She moved to Ceylon, didn't she at one point,

Sri Lanka. And she was a great friend of my great aunt, Julian Margaret Cameron, who photographed her. And there's a whole set of photographs of her by Julie Mark Cameron, who was one of the very first women photographers and who brought her equipment out to Sri Lanka. I think I've seen the photograph because there's a photograph there of her dressed up, quote, as a Sri Lanka native. Exactly that, with sort of palms behind her. I've seen that photo and she doesn't look much like a Sri Lankan to me. I mean, somebody's having a little joke with her at her expense saying, yes, yes, this is what we all were. Very, very good.

So look, let's talk about another commodity which is also central to empire, and that is rubber. Now, natural rubber is the sticky white sap, which you can tap from certain trees. At what point does imperialism come into contact with rubber and say, you know what, this could be an earner for us? Well, rubber was being grown mainly in Brazil, and it was being extracted, became a massive, obviously because of the Industrial Revolution, and also when Thomas Goodyear invented volcanization in 1839. Thomas Goodyear was a guy, Goodyear tires named Dr. Goodyear. He said, man, actually, my dad worked in a Goodyear factory in Wolverhampton, and perhaps less importantly. But demand for rubber boomed. But this resulted in terrible conditions for the indigenous South Americans who were murdered. enslaved, tortured. In some places, 90% of the Indian population was eliminated by atrocities and

disease. In order to get the rubber? Yeah, yeah. And today, many uncontacted Indians are descendants of the survivors of that time who fled into remote areas to escape a similar fate. But then one of the people who lobbied Q Gardens to help the British Empire to get involved in this very lucrative trade was a manufacturer called Thomas Hancock. And he's suggesting, suggested in 1855 to William Hooker that the Eastern West Indies would be a good place for rubber cultivation. It was a very challenging thing to do because, first of all, South America had a monopoly and they weren't keen to share their knowledge and seeds. Secondly, rubber seeds are recalcitrant, which means they die if they're permitted to dry out, which made them hard to transport.

And thirdly, it could take decades of trial and error to set up a rubber plantations. But nevertheless, two men, Henry Wickham and Robert Cross collected seeds. and between them, they managed to break into the wild rubber industry. And despite facing loads of other problems, the British became big rubber producers over around two decades of trial and error. And one of the first places they managed to make it work was Ceylon, Sri Lanka. But the place that it really took off was Singapore. And that's because the coffee plantations there weren't doing very well when coffee prices fell in

1896, and that's when the Malay Peninsula turned to rubber and planted 12,000 acres of trees over five years. What sort of date was that, Saturn? That was the late 19th century. So quite recently, I mean, it's not as if it's an indigenous plant that's been there for centuries, literally late 19th century. And also, it's very poorly understood, but the crude rubber, at that point, became Britain's top re-export. It became massively lucrative. And these seeds that Kew Garden sent, helped to establish what is now a multi-billion dollar rubber industry. It's incredible that it all came from a few seeds. And even some of the brands flourishing today, like Dunlop, the British tire firm,

have their roots in plantations in Malaya. This is so interesting. And just when you talk about the plantation in Singapore, the 1896 adventure, if you like, I mean, they do it with gusto. 12,000 acres of trees are planted over just five years. I mean, this is very committed planting and also sort of changing the ecosystem of a place that you have gone into. I'm really fascinated by this man Hooker, though. He seems so very powerful.

Does he work hand in glove with government somehow, sort of being able to greenlight expeditions or saying, yes, I agree, I rubber stamp this, if you will, that this is a good idea to go and, you know, pursue rubber as an economic exercise. Yeah, him and his son, Joseph Hooker, both of them, did incredible work. But I think it's really important to remember that as well as it being very impressive, it also led to one of the darkest episodes in the history of the British Empire because Malaya became hugely profitable to the British. But then, obviously, the Malayans weren't so keen on it. And when they resisted in 1948, it led to the Malayan emergency. And you've had Caroline Alkins on your show who describes it as one of the worst episodes in the British Empire. And do you know why it was called the Malayan emergency rather than a war? insurance reasons. Because if you call it a war, the business people don't get the insurance

payouts. If you call it an emergency. But it's also that euphemism is one of the reasons why it's so poorly understood because, you know, what the British did, and they resorted to starving people. It was one of the kind of experiment places for country insurgency techniques, wasn't it? Yeah, that massacring livestock, destroying crops but with Agent Origin. I mean, Caroline Elkins talks about how at the same time as the British were helping to draft the European Convention of Rights, you know, they were involved in mass murder and, you know, famously 24 unarmed villagers were killed in a rubber estate in Batangali. You know, it's often called Britain's Maillai. It was absolutely appalling. So we should marvel at how Q Gardens, I think, spent 1,500 pounds

establishing this industry. I've seen Caroline Elkins give a lecture about this. And she has a map in her presentation showing how counterinsurgency experts in inverted commas, in other words, the people doing these massacres and these horrific things get drafted from one counter insurgency to another. And so they move to the Suez Zone and then to, I think the Caribbean and then to various parts of Africa, as the kind of decolonial struggles crop up in different places, the same characters are moved around to deal with this. And actually her passages in a book, so shocking. I mean, opening fire with live ammunition on detention camps, torturing detainees by starvation, locking them up in cages beneath the hot sun for days on end, force-feeding them

soapy water. I mean, this is what the British Empire was doing after World War II. And also, all of this comes indirectly from Q Gardens, a place where we take our grandmother. I mean, I go there a lot. Every happy memory I have of children toddling around is that you can go to Q Gardens and three hours, three hours will be taken up by beautiful pointing at big ferns and, you know, big palm leaves and things like that. I mean, you are somebody who manages to find yourself on the battlefield of culture wars on any given day. Have you found that Q Gardens, or talking about Q Gardens in this way, has led you into another crossfire, if you like? Q Gardens has found itself in the centre of a cultural war inevitably, because they've been

talking about wanting to decolonize, and that attracted the attention of the Daily Tehrograph and certain Tory MPs. And so after initially talking positively about decolonization, you had the accused director Richard Deverell saying that, oh, you know, he didn't like the word decolonize. And also, you're not going to read anything, I think that is critical of Q's or indeed British history. This idea that history is this like grandmother you need to shield from insult or attack. So what was the initial proposition that? decolonize Q proposition was what, that we put labels beside things to explain the history of why this coffee bean plant is here or why this giant palm is here. Was that what the proposition was?

Pauli, it was basically it was in the shadow of the Black Lives Matter protests and Q Gardens published a 10-year manifesto for change where it declared that it really wanted to face up to its imperial and colonial past. That was it really. That was enough to really trigger people. But I think Q Gardens has found a way of talking about this history in a much more, you know, sane way, even though they made that statement, you know, they are doing lots of positive work. They've got a lot of PhD students looking into the history. They've published a bunch of books or helped to publish a bunch of books on the subject and one brilliant one, Palace of Palms by Kate Teltcher, another one called Just the Tonic about tonic water and Sinchona. And, you know, last time I went, they had Empire

World on sale in the bookshop. And I went to talk to their experts. and, you know, these are academics who want to have open discussions. We're going to be coming back to Q in a later episode because we're going to be looking at the network of Botanic Gardens set up, well, around the world, but also specifically in India. And it's a very distinct story because what you get is that companies, such as the East India Company, are very keen to have academic botanists working for them in order to find places where, for example, you can grow the poppy. The opium poppy, which we're going to be dealing with, and we're going to have a whole series on the opium war at some point, is something

which derives from botanists discovering where you can grow your poppies. And you get this strange nexus between academic botanists who see these botanic gardens in Saharanpur or in Calcutta or wherever it is as places where they can get funding for their work. And, you know, Yet it's also being used by the East India Company to make a buck. And in the case of obviously the opium poppy, spread a narcotic that is going to affect ultimately. Is it 30% of the Chinese population at some point become addicted to opium? It's like the worse than the fentanyl crisis in the United States. And yet there are parts of it, just like we like going to queue and love taking our children and push chairs,

there are aspects of this story which are very attractive. And some of the most beautiful botanical art, for example, comes from. men who were sent out by Hooker employing late mogul artists to paint these images and producing works of great beauty. And I think this is the whole complexity and interest of this period. I've never understood why understanding the history of a thing can mar the beauty in your eyes. I mean, it enriches, you know, knowing more is better, it's beautiful, I think. Totally. And opposite things can be true at the same time, which I think should be your slogan, because that is what your podcast is all about. And yeah, there was great beauty.

incredible innovation. But at the same time, there's colonisation, vicious war, torture, espionage, slavery and indenture. And as you say, both those things are true at the same time. And also, I mean, the works that places like you do with seed banks and, you know, perhaps future-proofing are benighted species as we sort of mess around with the climate and everything else. Listen, can we have you back? Because I think we've just scratched the surface on this. Will you come back and talk to us about the science? because you mentioned one thing, and I don't think we've drilled down into this. When you talked about Linnaeus and classification, come back, come back for another episode.

Until the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnens. And goodbye from me, William Duremple.