Horticultural Appropriation: Why Horticulture Needs Decolonising

Horticultural Appropriation is a conversation between an organic food grower and an artist about the possibility and necessity of bringing a decolonial lens to the practice of horticulture. Taking place within West Dean Art College and Gardens, the exchange explores how attempts to decolonise collections and spaces currently happening in arts and cultural institutions might inform the interrogation of the colonial history at the heart of Britain\x27s gardens and gardening.

The idea of \x27the garden\x27 is a complicated, curious thing. They loom large in the imagination―a locus of desire, aspiration, colonisation, care, effort, property, land and ownership, loss and literature. RTB have partnered up with the brilliant Garden Museum to bring into print a set of pamphlets that look to examine all of these ideas and more, with a group of writers and gardeners generating new work inspired in some way by our notions of all things green and pleasant, or perhaps less so. Has there ever been so much rich thought around the radical potential of gardening, with so much urgency surrounding how we maintain our little bits of earth, of the meaning that plants carry.