Cultivating Connections at the Royal Horticultural Society

Can plants tell us anything about people? What might British gardens reveal about non-European cultures? Can we learn anything from gardeners’ journals about past ecologies? On 12 May 2025, Dr Sarah Easterby-Smith co-organised a workshop exploring some of these questions (and more) at the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Lindley Library, in central London.

Bringing together around 20 humanities researchers, the ‘Cultivating Connections’ workshop also marked the formal online launch of the RHS Plant Collector Archive – a major new resource containing 3,875 digitised records relating to the expeditions of 121 plant collectors from 1821 to 2003. Our workshop focussed on materials relating to plant collecting in the nineteenth century.

Both the launch of this archive and the workshop are part of a significant new venture for the RHS Libraries. Heretofore used primarily by traditional garden historians or for specialist plant studies, the RHS Libraries are keen to expand the use of their resources into the emerging interdisciplinary field of Plant Humanities. The presence of so many humanities academics all at once was thus a great novelty for the library staff – but, as co-organiser Dr Fiona Davison (RHS Head of Libraries and Exhibitions) was keen to stress, a very welcome one.

Rather than requesting pre-prepared papers, we instead asked participants to search through the newly digitised collections and propose items to view on the day. Granted exclusive use of the library building, delegates were then able to look at the physical documents. The materials, which were set out on tables spread across all three floors of the library, were displayed alongside complementary sources proposed by the librarians – who were all on hand for further discussion. Seeing everything laid out in this way was like being presented with a box of delicious chocolates – everything was so fascinating it was (almost) impossible to decide what to look at first!

The RHS holds a substantial range of materials that actually extends far beyond the plant collector archive (though this was the focus of our workshop). So why might the RHS collections be of interest to humanities researchers? Well – to take the plant collector archive as an example – the collectors were obliged to record every element of their expeditions in journals and letters sent back to the Society. The archive thus includes descriptions of peoples from non-European cultures about whom few written materials have otherwise survived. The records also contain depictions of landscapes and environments at a level of detail only accessible to a botanically trained eye. Environmental change thus becomes visible in new ways. The documents evoke, too, the significant influence of nineteenth-century British colonial culture and travel writing tropes on what was seen, and on how it was described.

The workshop also introduced the key elements of a report into the colonial content of the archive, co-authored in 2022 by Dr Easterby-Smith and Dr Elena Romero-Passerin (now at the University of Exeter). The day concluded with a roundtable discussion about this report, and about the materials we had viewed during the workshop. We collectively flagged up so many further potential avenues to explore that it seemed only right to promise to meet again. This is a collaboration set to continue to bloom abundantly. For more on the eventual fruits of this venture, please watch this space…

To learn more about the Plant Collector Archive (or about the RHS archives in general), see the RHS Insights Blog – which also includes posts drawn from the Easterby-Smith and Romero-Passerin 2022 report.