The National Herbarium of New South Wales, Australia, acts as setting and springboard for Prudence Gibson’s narratives about and descriptions of preserved plants. Gibson holds in admirable tension the wonders of the herbarium and the troubling colonialism that assumed authority over Australia’s plants, collecting them without permission, naming and organizing them by European standards. The question of who owns plants hovers in the background.Gibson spent three years seeking “to find out what plant-human relations really are and what they mean. And what that meaning tells us about the herbarium” (p. xvi).
The chapter on Joseph Banks, for instance, dwells on the irony of Banksia, a widespread tree in Australia, being named for the famous English plant collector. Yes, he was an amazing collector, but the plant was there long before he arrived. Gibson describes some current efforts to add plant names used by Indigenous people to the herbarium descriptions. The task is challenging in part because the many Aboriginal groups have different names for the same plants.
The National Herbarium moved to a new site during the years Gibson was working on this project. The Plant Thieves includes some lively conversations between Gibson and local women artists creating art for the new building. Throughout Gibson expresses awe at the care given the plant samples in the herbarium.
One chapter recounts a collaboration between botanists and Indigenous Elders to solve a mystery about black beans. These large seeds (also called bogum or Moreton Bay chestnuts, also known as Castanospermum australe) are toxic, but Indigenous people process them for use in a bread called damper. (I used Google frequently to translate Australian terms.) Somehow the plant had spread hundreds of miles, puzzling scientists, because this plant does not spread easily. European settlers believed Indigenous people were not organized enough to establish long trade routes, a logical way the plant could have traveled. The Elders told a Songline story of an ancestral spirit carrying a bag of beans many miles. When scientists examined plants along the route described in the story, they found bean plants everywhere. This evidence supports the presence of a highly developed Indigenous social organization.
The Plant Thieves reads very easily. Gibson brings to life the many people she meets and provides much intriguing information about plants and their ties to the herbarium.
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 10, Issue 9, September 2023
“I am glad that the month of October 1970 has been assigned to us for displaying the original artwork for The Endemic Flora of Tasmania.” This is the beginning of a letter written in December 1969 to Brian O. Mulligan, the Director of what was known then as the University of Washington Arboretum. The writer was Robert D. Monroe, the Chief of Special Collections Division of the University Library (now University Libraries) which would host the exhibit in the Smith Room of Suzzallo Library.
Ellis Rowan (1848-1922) was an Australian painter, specializing in wildflowers in all parts of that country at a time when the native flora was not well-known by European settlers. She was not trained as a botanist, which made her work of limited use in that field. However, the exuberance and abundance (at least 3,000 survive) of her paintings made her very popular. She typically combined flowers with leaves and stems into bouquets, and worked quickly, being able to paint in watercolors and gouache without initial pencil underlay.