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.
Speaker
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Dr. Laura Premack
Dr. Laura Premack
Dr. Laura Premack writes about history, nature, landscape and politics. A graduate of Wesleyan, Harvard, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she holds a BA in the History of European Imperialism, an EdM in Education, and an MA and PhD in Global History. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the US Department of State, the US Department of Education, the Authors Foundation and Arts Council England.
After holding academic appointments and affiliations in the US, UK, Nigeria and Brazil, Laura left academia in 2019 and trained as a gardener at Holehird Gardens in England's Lake District. It was through studying for her Royal Horticultural Society qualification in Practical Horticulture that Laura found herself writing a new history of American plants. Botanica, to be published by Elliott & Thompson and Chelsea Green Press in 2027, brings together Laura's scholarly expertise in empire, race, religion and politics with her personal experience as a gardener and outdoorsperson who has lived and travelled throughout the United States and Latin America.
Laura considers home to be New England, where she grew up, and the northwest of England, where she lives with her partner and children. Great-granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States and Mexico, she is a fourth-generation American and a naturalised British citizen. She speaks English, Spanish and Portuguese.