Abstract

Exploring the life story of a ginger specimen within Amgueddfa Cymru’s Economic Botany collection, this talk will trace an individual plant’s journey through varied natural history display spaces.

Originally from India, the ginger specimen travelled to Wales in 1939 from London’s Imperial Institute, becoming part of an exhibition, ‘Plants in the Service of Man’. This exhibition aimed to ‘relay the importance of botany to the everyday lives of the Welsh public’ (Hyde 1939), and represented ginger and the world using particular practices and narratives. This talk explores the relationship between botanical forms used to display ginger – whether wax models, herbarium sheets, dioramas or living plants – and the situated narratives emerging from this – representations of species, biogeography and cultures.

Finally, this talk explores how taking a naturecultural (Haraway 2003) approach to display reveals how plants like ginger can both resist and become collaborators in curation. Looking forwards, it considers how this relates to decolonising museum practice, providing clues to move past enduring imperial logics in evolving naturecultural worlds.