Empires, Plants & Gardening: ‘What’s in a Name?’

Stories of horticulture and garden-making are often bound up with stories of empires. From the global trade in plants and the economic imperative behind botanic gardens to the acquired status and symbolism of certain plants and the realities of human exploitation, this series will explore the myriad ways in which economic and political power has influenced the seemingly commonplace activities of gardeners.

The series picks up themes and ideas from the Gardens and Empires conference presented in June 2025 by English Heritage and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in association with the British Library. Some of the speakers from the conference will be expanding on the topics they presented, and additional researchers have been invited to share their perspectives. The series will focus on European empires and will examine their global impact and influence on plants and gardening. We will explore issues from the perspective of both the coloniser and the colonised, of individuals and institutions, of the past and continuing legacies today – and will see both the triumphs and cruelties inherent in the stories around empires, plants and gardening.

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This ticket is for this individual talk and costs £8, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the links below, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire series of 8 talks at £56 via the link here. (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 8 for £42.) There will be an opportunity for Q & A after the session.

Ticket holders can join each session live and/or view a recording for up to 2 weeks afterwards.

Ticket sales close 4 hours before the talk.

Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk (If you do not receive this link, please contact us). A link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 2 weeks.

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Talk 1. 20 January: Commonwealth War Graves - Reflecting Evolution from Empire to Commonwealth, with David Richardson and Gareth Crossman. First in a series of 8 online talks, £8 each or all 8 for £56 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 8 for £42)

Talk 2. 27 January: Kew in Jamaica - Colonial Botany and the Tourist Gaze at the Hope Botanical Gardens, with Heather Craddock. Second in a series of 8 online talks, £8 each or all 8 for £56 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 8 for £42)

Talk 3. 3 February: NB at 6pm: Follies of Empire: Miniature Ruins and the Victorian Terrarium, with Lindsay Wells. Third in a series of 8 online talks, £8 each or all 8 for £56 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 8 for £42)

Talk 4. 10 February: Creole Gardens as Decolonial Practice - Regrowth, Recycling, Resistance and Repair, with Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Rosa Beunel-Fogarty. Fourth in a series of 8 online talks, £8 each or all 8 for £56 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 8 for £42)

Talk 5. 17 February: Deep in the Weeds - Colonial Language in British and North American Weeds, with Kimberly M. Glassman. Fifth in a series of 8 online talks, £8 each or all 8 for £56 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 8 for £42)

Talk 6. 24 February: ‘What’s in a Name?’ Plant Nomenclature in 17th-Century France, with Jérôme Brillaud. Sixth in a series of 8 online talks, £8 each or all 8 for £56 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 8 for £42)

Talk 7. 3 March: Legacies of Empire - The Royal Horticultural Society’s Plant Collector Archive, with Fiona Davison and Sarah Easterby-Smith. Seventh in a series of 8 online talks, £8 each or all 8 for £56 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 8 for £42)

Talk 8. 10 March: The Uprooted Empire - Epiphytes, Greenhouses and Hybrids in 19th-Century England, with Diego Molina. Last in a series of 8 online talks, £8 each or all 8 for £56 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 8 for £42)

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Talk 6. 24 February: ‘What’s in a Name?’ Plant Nomenclature in 17th-Century France, with Jérôme Brillaud

In My Garden (1991), Antiguan American writer Jamaica Kincaid wrote that the renaming of indigenous plants by Western botanists ‘emptied worlds of their names’. This lecture will present early modern lexical strategies to erase or (often erroneously) promote indigenous and regional plant names. Before the adoption of the binomial system for scientific terms in Latin and before today’s controversial efforts to update the International Code of Nomenclature with indigenous names, the naming of plants in the seventeenth century in France was as fascinating as it was complex. ‘‘What’s in a name?’ asked Juliet to Romeo. ‘That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’. In this lecture, we will provide other answers to Juliet’s question.

Jérôme Brillaud, Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Manchester, has published books and articles on early modern French culture. His current research is on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French kitchen gardens. His forthcoming book is entitled ‘Cultivating Knowledge: Translation and Fruticulture in Early Modern France and England.’

This session will be chaired by Jill Sinclair of the Gardens Trust.

Image: Detail of frontispiece to Nicolas de Bonnefons, The French Gardiner, translated by Philocepos, 1658, ©The Trustees of the British Museum, shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence

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