Paper short abstract:

The feijoa (Acca sellowiana) is a fruit species native on the highlands of southern Brazil and northern Uruguay. The species was introduced outside of its center of origin and being disseminated to various countries. This paper aims to understand the process of the spread of this fruit.

Paper long abstract:

Feijoa is a fruit that was and remain important to the economy of many countries where it was introduced. The objective of this paper is to analyze the historical process of the feijoa dissemination, around the world. The study of the spread of a plant species is a dynamic process that goes beyond borders and points out the importance of human beings on the frequent changes in landscape. Through the knowledge agencies such as Botanical gardens, associations and nurseries, that the feijoa was spread and acclimated in different regions as: France, United States, Russia, New Zeeland, Colombia and others. In the United States, the feijoa was introduced by the nurserymen and botanist Francesco Franchesci, who was responsible for popularizing the plant. The United States nurseries had an important role the process of spread plants for different countries, as happened with the feijoa in the 20th century. Nowadays, New Zealand and Colombia have gained the position of world largest producer and exporter of the fruit. In Brazil, farmers have been managing the species for several purposes, at least for a century, and in the last two decades, the agroecological production and commercialization has been increasingly in the fruit market. On the Brazilian ecosystem where feijoa is native, the damage caused by the introduction of exotic species have, especially in the last decades, taken quickly the space of this and other native species.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the expansion of 19th-century urban life in both Europe and in the tropical Andes led to a redistribution of plant species as a consequence of the expansion of the global trade of ornamental plants that promoted an international exchange unseen since the Columbian exchange.

Paper long abstract:

In 1887, the Englishman Albert Millican travelled through the Colombian Andes collecting orchids for the Veitch Nurseries in Chelsea. He gathered more than 10,000 plants and sent them back to England for sale to urban gardeners. Two years later, William McLane, an agent representing the Rochester's Live Plant Company from New York, signed a contract with the municipality of Bogotá to supply 30,000 plants commonly used in Europe for the city's parks. As a result, in the late nineteenth century, cities like Bogotá and London became ‘floristic islands’, with a higher concentration of imported plants than the regions surrounding them. This paper explores the transatlantic market in ornamental plants that emerged alongside the nineteenth-century urban expansion in Europe and South America. Analysing the trade in plants from a global perspective, the research reinterprets the role of plant hunters, botanical gardens and urban planners as key actors within an extractive industry built upon informal colonial relationships. The paper investigates how demand for tropical plants led to a ‘controlled tropicalisation’ of European cities, and, conversely, how the application of horticultural knowledge in urban planning led to the ‘Europeanisation’ of urban biodiversity in the Andean region. Alongside historical sources, including archives, newspapers and other publications, the research draws extensively on botanical collections and associated materials in Europe, the United States, and South America. For the first time, this investigation shows how particular urban aesthetic trends associated with nineteenth-century urbanisation entailed a redistribution of global biodiversity at a scale unseen since the Columbian exchange.

Paper short abstract:

Ancestral practices of iberian olive cultivation are being lost as intensive production is established, transforming the landscape and the human-environment relationship. This paper invites discussion about preserving the olive cultivation iberian identity and its sustainable productive character.

Paper long abstract:

The internationalization of the olive oil industry and the search for cheaper productions have led to a process of technological advance replacing the traditional methods of olive cultivation. This paper covers the scientific and historical technique of olive cultivation in Iberia, covering cases in Portugal and Spain from the perspective of the history of science and technology and its interface with environment and landscape studies in the early modern period. Its important fosters knowledge to understand the current consequences of super-intensive olive cultivation on the environment and society.

The changes in olive cultivation did not occur at the same time, scale, or typology. In the Corografia do Reino do Algarve (1577), the olive trees in the southern could not be cultivated as in the rest of Portugal as the soil was too dry. The solution was to graft them on the wild olives tree (Olea europaea L. var. sylvestris). The successful cultivation required a shift to farmer-controlled vegetative propagation. The rise of literature to disseminate the development of agronomic and botanical knowledge stands as an evidence in early modern period.

In current times, the main Portuguese varieties, 'Cobrançosa' and 'Galega Vulgar', are being replaced by the Spanish 'Arbequina', due to its “better performance” in super-intensive olive groves, that demand a lot of water. Since local varieties and practices giving way to global perspectives turned out to have negative effects on the ecosystems sustainability, this paper argues solutions can come from a deeper understanding local ancestral practices and historic olive varieties.

Paper short abstract:

Blueberries' century-long transformation into a global crop rested upon intersections between science, government-sponsored research, economic policies, and markets. This paper explores the complex histories of agroecological systems that undergird everyday blueberry consumption today.

Paper long abstract:

The century-long transformation of the blueberry into a global crop highlights the complex social circumstances that shape eating habits and opportunities. Blueberries’ commodification began in the late nineteenth century with lowbush varieties in Maine and eastern Canada, in an agroecological system of so-called wild varieties that actually proliferated under human management. In particular, legally-defined land leasing arrangements and regular controlled burns in the state of Maine facilitated the commercial rise of blueberries as a canned product. The fruit that dominates today’s trade in fresh blueberries, however, comes from a highbush species, Vaccinium corymbosum, that was not domesticated until the early twentieth century. In 1909, Frederic Vernon Coville, chief botanist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, made the key discovery that blueberry plants require highly acidic soil. Subsequent collaboration between Coville and New Jersey cranberry grower Elizabeth White then led to improved highbush varieties, which formed the basis for a competing agroecological system in the form of commercially farmed blueberries. Domesticated blueberry production, once confined to North America, spread abroad in the post-World War II period, and blueberry plants' ongoing globalization continues today. Blueberries’ emergence as a global crop grew out of an elaborate combination of circumstances and intersections between science, government-sponsored research, economic policies, and markets. In an urbanizing world of people increasingly alienated from their food sources, blueberries provide a reminder of the intricate relationships between people and plants that shape both basic prospects of survival and specific ways of life, whether for good or for ill.

Paper short abstract:

Kapok was an important industrial commodity in the 19-20th centuries before being replaced by plastic. Yet kapok was not one thing or even one species. This paper traces the development of kapok as a commodity category and efforts to improve, transplant, or replace kapok trees around the tropics.

Paper long abstract:

During the 19-20th centuries, kapok was an industrial super material: an ultra-light, waterproof, buoyant, insulating fiber, kapok fiber harvested from kapok tree seed pods appeared in a range of industrial products in addition to its traditional uses in stuffing pillows and mattresses. Like cotton, another key industrial fiber, kapok was not one uniform thing or even one species of plant. This paper will examine the scientific and commercial construction of “kapok” as a commodity from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth centuries.

Using evidence from botanists, merchants, inventors, and colonial administrations, I identify how kapok trees and fiber were categorized and standardized into two main types from two species: “Java kapok,” Ceiba pentandra, produced mostly in Indonesia under Dutch colonial occupation; and “Indian kapok,” Bombax ceiba, produced in India and other parts of South Asia under British colonial rule. The paper then shows how colonial projects to expand kapok production attempted to move these species around the globe, to improve them in places where the trees already grew, and to find new fibers that could substitute for kapok in commodity markets. The paper will also explore characteristics of the trees that discouraged plantation production and sustained smallholdings, and will conclude with a brief review of the impact of plastics and other synthetics on kapok markets and kapok producers.

Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with the movement of Assam tea plant (Camellia sinensis var. assamica) from the forests to the plantations in Assam, and further out in the world. The mobility of the plant has been facilitated through imperial infrastructures such as botanical gardens and tea research stations.

Paper long abstract:

The Assam tea plant (Camellia sinensis var. assamica) has travelled from the forest of Assam into the colonial plantation and further out in the world. The plant has proven to be especially robust and with several attractive properties rendering it suitable for large-scale, monocultural commodity production. The paper will focus on the role of imperial infrastructures in facilitating the movement of the tea plant, with particular focus on the knowledge infrastructure of botanical gardens and tea research institutions established across the colonial world. As a plantation crop, the key concern has been to develop ever more high yielding clones. Escalating climate change has brought this project to an impasse, and the critical issue today is how to bring diversity into the plantation.

In thinking through this history of plant mobility, I will use Head's et al (2012) notion of "plantiness", that is, "the materialities and capacities of plants in their own terms". As the tea plant has been brought into the confined and controlled space of the plantation, the lively features of plant life seems to be lost. Yet, as I will show, the tea plant still exercise independent agency and in the ruins of failed imperial projects, feral tea plants have made a home on new continents.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation considers the first century of sequoias and redwoods in Germany and how the species symbolized the US and Germany’s shared values. The trees were later used to teach environmental racism through eugenics in park and museum displays in Stuttgart and Weinheim institutions.

Paper long abstract:

California native trees, specifically Giant Sequoias and Coast Redwoods took root in the lands and minds of Germany in the 1850s. Both species served political purposes for both countries. For example, Giant Sequoias as a way to sell ideas of the US and its frontier to Germany, beginning when the California native trees branched out from their endemic ecosystems with German workers in the US sending seeds as curios and Alexander von Humboldt’s students’ curiosity as they explored the US West. The gardens of King Wilhelm I nurtured approximately 8,000 sequoia seedlings that were sold, given, and redistributed throughout royal forests and Chancellor Bismark continued this work, commissioning research on Giant Sequoias to address the timber famine in 1870. This was, at the time, a sign of goodwill between the countries, as both countries felt the trees symbolized the inherent strength of their nations. Going into the twentieth century, however, these shared ideas became entangled with white supremacy and eugenics. Sequoias and the later-introduced Coast Redwoods grew into symbols of the naturalness of white supremacy, curated and interpreted to educate the public of these political ideals. In this presentation, I discuss the first century of sequoias and redwoods in Germany, specifically how the species symbolized the US and Germany’s shared values and later were used to communicate environmental racism through eugenics in park and museum displays in Stuttgart’s Killesbergpark and Wilhelma and Weinheim’s Exotenwald.

Paper short abstract:

Maize was transplanted from the Americas to 16th Europe lacking fundamental culinary knowledge. This led to the pellagra disease centuries later following maize’s increasing monocultural cultivation. This paper provides a wider panorama on plant transfer and the pitfalls of monoculture agriculture.

Paper long abstract:

In the late 18th century, a scourge of unknown origins struck parts of Southern Europe: the disease soon to be called pellagra. Shortly debates started that linked it to the strong monocultural consumption of maize, particularly in poorer regions of Northern Italy and Spain. The real culprit, deficiency of vitamin B3, would only be discovered in the early 20th century. Yet these discussions among scholars, writers and scientists reveal much about the impact that one American foodstuff could have in Europe, centuries after its first introduction.

In particular, it shows how oftentimes plants would be transplanted starting in the 16th century, but lacking fundamental agricultural knowledge and culinary practices. Maize was and still is of major cultural and spiritual importance to many Mesoamerican indigenous peoples, playing a major role in creation myths. Its preparation includes what the Nahua call nixtamalization, alkali preparation methods that ensured the added nutrition necessary to prevent the aforementioned deficiencies.

This paper first discusses the transposition of maize to Europe, with emphasis on this cultural heritage. In a second step it will focus on debates surrounding maize and pellagra in 19th century Northern Italy to provide a wider panorama on plant transfer and the pitfalls of monoculture agriculture; as well as on their implications for ecology and politics. Political measures, including a focus on a more varied diet for poorer people, helped eradicate pellagra in Italy by the 1920s. This story has particular resonance in our time, when the oftentimes disastrous health impact of industrial agriculture on humans and non-humans alike is becoming ever more evident.

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the cultural histories of non-native forage maize in agricultural Denmark. It considers the historical eruption of engineered feed crops through the concept of transplantation ecologies: distorted environmental patches where science defines the limits of agricultural production.

Paper long abstract:

The summer of 2023 was tough on Danish farmers, struggling through the longest drought in recorded national history to secure enough feed for a livestock population that outnumbers humans 5-fold. While traditional forage crops such as barley and wheat withered, lush rows of forage maize shot up under the hot sun. This paper traces the cultural histories of these forage maize as “Anthropocene eruptions” (Tsing 2016) in agricultural Denmark, where livestock farmers have come to know dry heat as “corn weather”. In the 1970s, and following decades of research and international collaboration, Danish plant and soil scientists pioneered a novel forage maize variety from non-native transplants that would grow even in the cold and wet Nordic climate. With this strong-stemmed and strategically deep rooted corn variety, agricultural baselines transformed alongside natural environments: corn rows in fields previously used as grazing pastures meant cheap access to fiber and energy, the necessary tools of increasing livestock herds. By analyzing the industrial and environmental changes that ensued as engineered forage maize spread across rural Denmark, the paper asks how the historical introduction of a viable Danish corn variety simultaneously implied (re)creating Danish nature as viable for corn. To this end, the paper considers the historical eruption of forage maize and other feed crops in otherwise hostile places through the concept of transplantation ecologies: modernist and distorted environmental patches sponsored by the idea that state-of-the-art science and technology, rather than particular landscapes and their climates, should define the safe operating space for agricultural production.