The image I retain of my first visit to Andromeda Botanic Gardens in Bathsheba, Barbados, is somewhat clichéd: city folk let loose in the luscious foliage. The gardens offered a sort of rejuvenation; they appeared expansive, yet private among the enveloping trees and infinite shades of green. At the time I visited, in late 2023, I was unaware that, as I passed the Pride of Barbados bush with its perfectly oval leaves and the odd pink, yellow or orange flower, The Ground was beginning to bloom.
Established to celebrate Andromeda’s 70th anniversary and what would have been its founder Iris Bannochie’s 110th birthday, The Ground is an ethnobotanical garden dedicated to plants that enslaved people on the island would have used medicinally. Head gardener Sharon Cooke was motivated to create this two-acre garden-within-a-garden to make Andromeda more relevant to the people of Barbados. ‘Iris Bannochie did something really amazing – the trees, the beauty that you cannot deny in this garden. But where is Barbados? There wasn’t any us – there wasn’t any Bajan in it,’ says Sharon, using the local term for Barbadians.
Undoubtedly, Bannochie created an oasis for visitors and deservedly placed Andromeda on the horticultural map by consistently winning gold and silver medals at Chelsea Flower Show. But some would argue that she brought a colonial approach to the botanical garden – typified by excessive collecting of international species – which as a result eschewed Barbadian ethnobotanical knowledge.
Historically, the plants featured in Andromeda’s new garden were likely grown on provision grounds. Also referred to as yam grounds, plots or slave gardens, these were the small parcels of often marginal land assigned to enslaved people across the British Caribbean (some also created ‘dooryard gardens’ in front of their homes for more demanding plants). Provision grounds offered enslaved people a small space where they had agency over what they grew, and even smaller windows of time to experience a sense of freedom. These moments came in stark contrast to the extractive monocrop culture of plantations, which involved long hours of violently enforced agricultural labour.
As historical artefacts and analytical tools, provision grounds have been a topic of conversation across academic disciplines in recent decades. And, inspired by pioneering thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter (who wrote about the distinct relationships to land that developed on the plantation versus the provision ground), a new generation of academics is using them as a way of understanding our current spatial order, with its legacies of colonialism and, importantly, resistance. JT Roane’s 2019 paper Plotting the Black Commons, for example, unpacks how the insurgent land and water practices fostered by enslaved people in the States continue to echo in Black communities to this day. Meanwhile, in her 2023 paper Reproducing the Plot, Rachel Goffe reflects on land monopolisation in Jamaica as an afterlife of slavery and one community’s alternative way of claiming a right to land.
‘I think sometimes when you choose a particular plant to study, you can almost, almost figure out the history of a people, if you trace back its uses from centuries,’ says Sharon. In The Ground visitors might spy the pigeon pea plant, whose seeds travelled from West Africa alongside trafficked people on slave ships. Its dark, narrow leaves were used to treat diarrhoea, demarcate boundaries, improve soil health and feed animals, but perhaps its most long-term use across the Caribbean is as food. The pigeon pea illustrates an African, pre-slavery history that Sharon is keen to make explicit in the garden.
The quintessential plantain tree also features. As well as providing another food staple for enslaved people in Barbados, it was historically used to heal eye inflammation and skin ulcers. And, of course, there is the pride of Barbados (Caesalpinia pulcherrima), used by enslaved women to abort pregnancies. In the post-emancipation period the plant served as a boundary marker (given both its prettiness and prickliness), and in the post-colonial period the pride of Barbados became exactly that – it was adopted as Barbados’s national flower.
This is a powerful archive that the Andromeda Botanic Gardens team hopes will provide an embodied, sensory experience for both gardeners and casual visitors. It is an archive of resistance against plantation slavery and its attendant health issues, and against the destruction of cultural practices and spaces where joy could blossom. For Sharon, the fact that enslaved people in Barbados managed to preserve elements of their pre-slavery growing heritage is miraculous considering its flat topography: ‘Barbados is different from the other islands, where a lot of the enslaved people could go and hide in the mountains,’ she says. On Caribbean islands with greater peaks, for example, those who fled the plantations had better access to unmonitored land on which to ‘continue practising their African traditions’.
Across the pond, London has proved fertile ground for a plethora of public gardens that similarly work to connect African diasporic communities to their growing heritage. As well as Black Rootz, a collective based at Wolves Lane horticultural centre in north London working towards food sovereignty, there is Coco Collective, a community garden in Lewisham, and Grannie’s Caribbean Garden, which runs workshops at Loughborough Farm in Lambeth South for older people to connect with their gardening heritage.
In southeast London, the Abeng Community Garden is forming, co-created by Cherrelle Douglas, Charlene Henderson and Rachael Deterville. Cherrelle, a herbalist based in the capital, says that ‘studying herbalism formally gave me a good foundation, but the parts that spoke to the practices of my heritage were missing’. She continues: ‘It’s important because herbalism wouldn’t be what it is today without the contribution of African plant knowledge.’ This led Cherrelle, with the support of mentors, to develop a herbalism practice that emphasises African and African-diasporic approaches to healing – a powerful thing, she says, as Black patients in the UK continue to experience racism in the medical system. Importantly for Cherrelle, just being in the garden space is healing.
At the core of these community gardens is an understanding that the rich growing heritage of African-diasporic people is necessary to build more resilient communities, particularly in towns and cities where access to green space is limited. This is echoed by Sharon’s hopes for the future of The Ground and all gardens globally, which she argues should ‘show the culture… Not just be a pretty garden for people to walk around.’
The Ground opens 7 December 2024. Visit andromedabarbados.com
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