Botanical gardens remade colonial landscapes into idealized European countryside

Evidence

Gavin Lucas rightly extends “white pastoral” to broader forms of visual and material culture, including maps and crafted landscapes – what places are emphasized or enlarged in the former case, the layout, imported fauna and flora in the latter. The founding of Kirstenbosch, the botanical gardens at the then edge of Cape Town, by Anne Barnard, the Cape Governor’s wife, towards the end of the eighteenth century exemplifies the point. The Cape was imagined as, if not quite completely metamorphed into, the shrinking Kentish countryside, Kaapstadt indeed into Cape Town. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1404

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ — Kirstenbosch garden founding and the importation of colonial flora is a concrete instance of trees and landscapes as worldbuilding/empire-building infrastructure.
• XREF: Connects to the essay on gardens replacing sacred groves from earlier reading, and to the broader theme of botanical imperialism (e.g., Kew Gardens). — connects to: Settlers represented colonized land as edenic European gardens in ‘white pastoral’ writing — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1403