Notes from Unearthed

The Unearthed exhibition hosted by the Living Knowledge Network at the British Library framed gardening as more than leisurely. Gardening has meant so many things to so many people. The displays traced through history, science, art and activism, showing how gardens have been sites of nourishment, resilience, community and also power.

I looked at botanical artefacts, manuscripts, handwritten records, the first mechanical lawnmower, and Darwin’s vasculum interwoven with gardening’s radical role in social and political movements.

Below is the first printed gardening manual and the first gardening manual for women which included intricate designs showing how knot gardens could be laid out.

Constant work was needed to maintain a large garden. In 1686, John Evelyn wrote a volume of detailed instructions for his gardener. In this extract, he sets out the tasks for the kitchen garden. The lists of 'rootes, 'salads & pot herbs' and 'sweete herbs' show how densely packed a kitchen garden of the time could be.

This original drawing for one of the book's illustrations shows a papaya with its name written in Arabic, Latin, Malayalam and Konkani. The book and its illustrations were compiled by the then colonial governor of Malabar. Indian herbalist, Itty Achudan, selected the plants to include.

Guerrilla gardening is a practice of 'normalising gardening in public space'. In his manuals Richard Reynolds suggests choosing hardy evergreen plants that don't require watering, such as lavender and rosemary or primulas to brighten up bare, neglected urban spaces.

Some of the finest botanical illustrations addressed colonial legacies and present-day impact of historical plant hunting on Indigenous communities and local ecosystems.

Pressing plants between the pages of books preserves them for posterity. Botanists press plants to create herbariums — systemic collections of dried plants — but the technique is also used by hobbyists and gardeners.

Plant hunting fuelled the development of botany and natural history in Europe. Charles Darwin was one of many scientists whose work was influenced by knowledge gained from plant hunting. This vasculum, a container for storing plant cuttings, belonged to Darwin and was used by him on expeditions to South America. He went on to use the data compiled from this voyage to help formulate his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Gilbert White meticulously recorded weather, plants and animals to build up a complete picture of his garden and the surrounding countryside. Through these observations, he learned to tend his garden in harmony with the seasons.

The first mechanical lawnmower built by Edwin Budding brought the perfectly manicured lawns within reach of domestic gardens. The lawnmower made the lawn a middle-class, suburban obsession. Budding apparently tested his lawnmower at night to avoid ridicule from his neighbours.

A nice juxstaposition here: Fuck Lawns! was a radical call to action that decries the typical perfectly manicured garden lawn as an unsustainable monoculture. It describes the lawn as a historic symbol of ‘control, dominance and status’ and argues that the typical lawn does not contribute to our garden ecosystem. Unknown lawns can be full of Indigenous plants that provide habitats for all sorts of life and are far more sustainable.

Lots of analogies to carry into my digital garden!