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.

This January 8-part online series from The Gardens Trust 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 colonized, 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.

This ticket link is for the series of 8 talks at £56 or you may purchase a ticket for individual talks, costing £8. (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 8 for £42). There will be an opportunity for Q & A after each session. Ticket holders can join each session live and/or view a recording for up to 2 weeks.

Lecture 6 will be held on February 24. 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