Urban Botanical Gardens and the Aesthetics of Ecological Learning: A Theoretical Discussion and Preliminary Insights from Montreal's Botanical Garden

Abstract

IntroductionThey always called it Magic and indeed it seemed like it in the months that followed-the wonderful months-the radiant months-the amazing ones. Oh!, the things which happened in that garden! If you have never had a garden you cannot understand, and if you have had a garden you will know that it would take a whole book to describe all that came to pass there. [Burnett 1998:282]In this article I address the intersection of human-nonhuman natures in the context of urban botanical gardens in North America, and more specifically at the botanical gardens of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. In so doing, I contribute to efforts within environmental anthropology to scrutinize the myriad of socio-culturally situated processes that inform the interactive formation of human knowledge of non-human systems. Nevertheless, I take this important body of literature further by arguing that even though the context of botanical gardens - and indeed gardens in general - has received little attention by environmental anthropologists, it has enormous potential for a better understanding of the complexity and depth of human-environment relations. As such, this article represents a small but significant contribution to anthropological engagements with human-nature interfaces.To be sure, there exists an extensive anthropological literature on the human ecology of gardens in non-urban and non-Western settings that came out of a tradition of anthropological research in the Indonesian archipelago (for example, Eyde 1983; Rappaport 1968; Sillitoe 1983). The gardens in these studies, however, are qualitatively different from the types of gardens with which I am concerned in this article. Specifically, the gardens that interested Oceanist anthropologists are said to either mimic or to be, to a great extent, embedded in surrounding ecosystems. As more recently described by Tsing (2004), there is significant ecological and aesthetic continuity between these farm gardens and the rainforest ecosystems in which they have been estabUshed.Western gardens, by contrast, and urban botanical gardens in particular, are most commonly described as quintessentially non-nature. This perspective is understandable, since these gardens are often enclosed by high walls and surrounded by (sub)urban landscapes with which they appear to have no continuity whatsoever. Moreover, botanical gardens bring together assemblages of plants that do not exist together in natural ecosystems, which are manicured into fanciful shapes, and which are frequently displayed according to historical relationships between colonial powers and colonized peoples. In the context of environmental anthropology's constructivist turn, therefore, it should come as no surprise that these types of gardens are usually described as modernist abominations in which nature must submit to colonial fantasies of conquest and mastery (see for example Verdi 2004; Sharma2006).There is no doubt that botanical gardens often do reflect modern values of control and colonial fantasies of conquest. In spite of this, however, gardens are the only spaces that many urban dweUers have for engaging with non-human natures - regardless of the extent to which humans have already transformed these natures. As Cooper contends (2003), Western gardens are places where people living in cities can consider, negotiate and perform relationships between human and non-human ontologies, thus setting limitations and creating possibilities for what can be perceived and known. He further argues that these types of relationships and performances can occur in spite of the ephemeral nature of urban botanical gardens. In this article I go one step further, showing that the ephemeral nature of botanical gardens is actuaUy essential to these relationships and performances. In other words, I contend that these relationships and performances occur not in spite of, but rather precisely because of, the ephemeral nature of gardens. …