It’s all connected and it’s complicated
I’ve been reading up on Joseph Banks, who was an imperialist. He was an energetic and driven member of the ruling class, taking opportunities where he saw them to improve the situation for his homeland. Also, a kind, generous, and gregarious scientist, but that’s another story. Banks’s life is at least five stories.
There is one book about Joseph Banks I can’t bring myself to read – Planting the World, by Jordan Goodman. Banks and his ilk cheerfully transplanted plants all over the British Empire (much of the world, at the time.) I really don’t think the Oriental bittersweet that is the bane of my garden is Banks’s fault. Surely not. It seems to have been introduced to the US by a nursery in Flushing NY about 1880, more than half a decade after Banks died – the appropriately titled story is here: Untangling the Twisted Tale of Oriental Bittersweet - Arnold Arboretum | Arnold Arboretum (harvard.edu) And if the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and the British had not sailed forth to create the global world we live in, it would have happened anyway. We are enterprising as a species, that’s part of our complicated. There would be different stories to tell, if the oceans had been crossed by different people at different times, and maybe many of us would speak different languages, but we’d all be connected somehow.
And I have my roses (native broadly in Eurasia – some varieties are invasive in the US) and my peonies (China) and my beloved daylilies (Asia) so it’s not as if I abjure the non-native.
Garden club meetings are sometimes about how to design a garden, or care for your roses, houseplants, etc, but often they are about invasive species (invasive species are non-native plants and animals that out-compete the native, often because there are no predators in the new location). In southern New Hampshire, this includes vines, loosestrife, Japanese beetles, and Asian jumping worms that we have now, and the Chinese lantern flies that are surely coming. I wonder what transplanted pests people in Asia have from us – do they have garden club meetings about how to cope with pests from the Americas? Probably. Corn and peppers are everywhere, after all, and it is unlikely invasive species were avoided altogether.
I look at the book Planting the World, in the to-read stack, where it has been for a year, and I just can’t. In a few weeks or so the hyacinths (Eastern Mediterranean, tropical Africa) will start to bloom, and I will renew my local battle against the vines. And mourn a little bit when I walk in the woods. There’s not much I can do about the forests that are threatened by the vines. I’ll keep plugging away at Banks and his correspondents and the physical sciences, and I’ll keep enjoying my roses and peonies and daylilies, and I’ll keep pulling out vines, but I can’t bring myself to read a book celebrating moving plants around the world.
There is beauty and destruction and good and bad, all tangled up together. It's complicated.