Histories of Plant Trade and Movement

Humans have likely always sought out new plants as tools, foods, spices, medicines, textiles and cosmetics. Over thousands of years humans have moved plants around the globe through trade and commodities of war. Ancient Egypt’s Queen Hatshepsut was known to send ships to other parts of Africa and/or Asia to gather incense trees and other exotic plant goods. Alexander the Great sent plants back from his war campaigns from vast regions from Iran to India. One of these plants from India was the cotton plant. The development of the Silk Road and other trade routes meant plant materials could spread more easily from East to West. With the spread of the Roman empire to the eastern Mediterranean, north Africa and western Europe, the Romans planted food crops in all of these regions that were from other regions of the world but suited to their new climates, for example they introduced figs and leeks to Britain. Between the eighth and fifteenth centuries the spread of Islamic power through Europe introduced plants from India and the tropics like citrus fruits, taro and sugarcane to Spain and Portugal. In the fifteenth century there was a European race between Spain and Portugal to discover plant spices which were worth huge amounts of money. Nutmeg and cloves were found in Indonesia and ginger, pepper and cinnamon were found in India and Sri Lanka and led to a surge of world exploration and exploitation of the Caribbean and the Americas to find more spices and other useful plants (Fry, 2017) ³.

There were also plants that were ‘hunted’ by powerful nations such as Britain for their interesting aesthetic and potential commodity value to wealthy gardeners who valued exotic new specimens.  China was heavily explored by the British, including Earnest Wilson in the Victorian area, initially to convert Chinese people to Christianity, but then to seek and export interesting, valuable plant species for British gardeners. Earnest Wilson is credited with being the first to export the Kiwi Fruit, Acer griseum, Clematis armandii, among many others to Britain (PlantExplorers 2024)² .

Physic Gardens

Herbal medicine has likely been practiced by humans since the beginning of our evolution. Neanderthal remains have been discovered among plants with medicinal properties such as yarrow- a wound astringent (Dumiak 2024)⁴. Scientists have deciphered herbal medical prescriptions written on Egyptian papyri from 1850 B.C.  Both Indian and Chinese cultures also have medical books dating as far back as 500 B.C that record hundreds of medicinal plant treatments that are local to their respective regions. There are innumerable cultures around the world who have an oral history of regional medicinal plants and practices that have not been written down, including indigenous culture practices that still exist today. As western power grew and obtained more plant commodities from around the world, the knowledge of botany and medicinal plant properties grew more popular in western culture. In Padua, Italy, the first reference garden of plants in Europe was founded in 1545 to use plants for science, research and education. These physic gardens were quick to be built in other parts of Europe. Physic gardens became repositories for plants that would arrive from expeditions to other parts of the world and shifted to what we know today as botanical gardens (Fry, 2017) ³.

Contemporary Botanical Gardens and Plant Hunters

One of the largest and most famous botanical gardens today is Kew Gardens in London. Kew Gardens is not only used for tourism, but has a prolific medical research garden and laboratory. Their mission is: “to help stop biodiversity loss and develop nature-based solutions to some of humanity’s biggest global challenges.” They have 400+ scientists all over the world who are doing research about plant conservation, medicinal plant qualities,  and climate change issues. While the majority of westerners may use pharmaceuticals for their ailments now, medicinal plant properties are still vitally important to 80% of the developing world, who depend on natural medicine for care (Dumiak 2024)⁴. Agriculture and climate change are quickly ransacking earth’s biodiversity, so plant hunters are now working to discover and protect plant species that may be important medicines before they go extinct.

Humans move plants, but plants also move themselves in order to reproduce. “The Incredible Journey of Plants” is a book by Italian botanist and professor Stefano Mancuso about how plants have travelled around the world via their own devices including different ways of spreading seeds great distances, including sailing, rolling, floating, or enticing animals to transport their seeds. Mancuso is also in the field of plant neurobiolology.  This new science is about how plants communicate (signal) with each other to communicate their needs and stress. (Mancuso 2010)⁵. Studying how plants signal and reproduce is an important component to understanding the complexities of the natural world.

Ethnobotany

One such plant hunter is Cassandra Leah Quave, an Ethnobotanist and professor at Emory University who has worked for decades to find plants that may have natural chemical compounds to fight antibiotic resistant infections such as MRSA. Ethnobotany is the study of human relationships to plants and by studying how different cultures use medicinal plants, Dr. Quave can find leads to new cures.

Plants are being rapidly endangered by climate change and Indigenous cultures and traditional knowledge have also been quickly disappearing due to Capitalist expansion and globalism.  Indigenous cultures are knowledge keepers to local plant knowledge, so along with their disappearance, we lose their important contributions in natural medicines. It is well concluded by Dr. Quave about her research about Indigenous medicines in the Amazon…

“The ongoing and rapidly increased Western presence and corporate resource extraction through the arteries of the Amazon had left its mark on the land, levelling dense forests rich in biodiversity through clear-cutting and scarring the earth with deep gaping holes as part of gold-mining efforts. But it wasn’t just the land that suffered; it was the people who lived on that land, who depended upon it for shelter and substance, not to mention the intimate cultural and ritual relationship they had with it. Mextizo people, first stripped of their Indigenous heritage through subjugation and enslavement during the rubber boom, and the more recent introduction of government-run schools and the general encroachment of capitalist economics, now lived in clusters along the main riverbanks, no strangers to the forces of international commerce and development….These people would have still relied upon medicine men and on the natural world around them for their subsistence. Now, it seemed to me that they were caught somewhere between the old ways and the new. Many in these communities had lost the knowledge I sought about traditional plant medicine, and yet they were not fully enjoying the real boons of what Western medicine could offer.” (Quave, 2022)¹

It is important to note that although many scientists who use Indigenous knowledge have the best intentions for respecting Indigenous rights, there are ongoing infringements on Indigenous people’s culture and land for resource extraction. Most plant medicine ‘discoveries’ in the modern world begin with Indigenous plant knowledge. An example is Alexander von Humbolt’s 1832 documentation of the cultural plant ingredients used to make Amazon people’s use of curare poison darts. This complex plant poison works by causing paralysis in the diaphragm of hunted animals, causing them to stop breathing. In 1935 Harold King determined the structure of the active compound of the poison (D-tubocurarine) in a lab. This simplified compound then became used in Western medicine as a muscle relaxant, and later a synthetic derivative was developed to be used by modern anesthesiologists to relax the patient’s body during surgeries (Quave, 2022)¹. Without seeing the Indigenous use of plant-derived poison darts, Western medicine may never have found the compound we use as a muscle relaxant today.

A couple prolific contemporary ethnobotanists working in Southern BC include Nancy J Turner and Leigh Joseph. Nancy J Turner has written prolifically on the Indigenous native foods and cultural practices of BC Indigenous groups and beyond. One of her students, Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) First Nation member Leigh Joseph, has done her Doctoral research on how improvement in the health of first nations communities may be made by connecting them back to ancestral plant foods:

“We are in a time, as Indigenous Peoples, where we are building a renewed sense of connection to the land and all that it offers to sustain us physically, spiritually and emotionally. The foods and medicines we harvest, prepare and utilize heal us on many different levels. In this time of Indigenous Knowledge renewal and healing we are looking to our ancestors for guidance as we move towards healing though connecting to our Traditional Knowledge” (Joseph)⁶.

How might the work of Ethnobotany affect Landscape Architects? Landscape Architects can learn the important cultural relationships between communities of people and plants from Ethnobotany. A people’s relationship to specific plants may inform a landscape architect’s plant palette choices to cater to what is important to their community and environment and therefore creating a stronger project impact.

1. [Quave, C. L. (2022). The Plant Hunter: A scientist’s quest for nature’s next medicines. Penguin Books.]
2. [Ernest Henry Wilson (1876 – 1930).  PlantExplorers. (2024). https://www.plantexplorers.com/explorers/biographies/wilson/ernest-henry-willson.htm]
3. [Fry, C. (2017). The plant hunters: The adventures of the world’s greatest botanical explorers. Carlton Books Ltd.]
4. [Dumiak, M.  (2024, Apr). The Kew and the Cure. Landscape Architecture Magazine, Vol 11 (04), 72]
5. [Mancuso, S. (2010). Stefano Mancuso. TED. https://www.ted.com/speakers/stefano_mancuso]
6. [Research. Leigh Joseph (Styawat), Ethnobotanist. (n.d.). https://www.leighjoseph.com/research]