More Than One Way to See a Garden: Reconciling a passion for flowers with gardens’ difficult histories
11 November 2025
Our gardens have difficult histories. Plants acquired through theft and disregard. Funds created by slavery and exploitation. Legacies of deforestation and extinction. Is it necessary to maintain constant awareness of these things when all one wants is delight in a flower, to breathe in the calming scent of soil, to tend seedlings, to relish a harvest? If we acknowledge the difficult histories of our gardens, are we still allowed to love them?
Global historian and keen gardener Dr Laura Premack wrestles with these questions as she researches and writes Botanica, her debut work of creative nonfiction which re-tells the stories of plants from the Americas that found their way to British gardens, and which challenges the mythologies surrounding Britain’s vaunted ‘plant-hunters.’
In this talk, she’ll share what brought her to this project, some methods she’s using to decolonise the English garden, and how she reconciles her deepening knowledge of gardens’ difficult histories with her own enduring love for them.
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11 November 2025
Our gardens have difficult histories. Plants acquired through theft and disregard. Funds created by slavery and exploitation. Legacies of deforestation and extinction. Is it necessary to maintain constant awareness of these things when all one wants is delight in a flower, to breathe in the calming scent of soil, to tend seedlings, to relish a harvest? If we acknowledge the difficult histories of our gardens, are we still allowed to love them?
Global historian and keen gardener Dr Laura Premack wrestles with these questions as she researches and writes Botanica, her debut work of creative nonfiction which re-tells the stories of plants from the Americas that found their way to British gardens, and which challenges the mythologies surrounding Britain’s vaunted ‘plant-hunters.’
In this talk, she’ll share what brought her to this project, some methods she’s using to decolonise the English garden, and how she reconciles her deepening knowledge of gardens’ difficult histories with her own enduring love for them.
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