This project was developed during Leela Keshav’s master's at the Architectural Association in London, where she currently studies. The project looks at the transcontinental movement of seeds during the height of British colonialism as a project of controlling and profiting from the natural realm. She’s interested in the intersection of seeds and power: Who has access to seeds? Who controls their distribution and movement? And, most importantly, how does the seeds' own agency play a role?
01: Archival Tapestry
The rubber tree (hevea brasiliensis) is key to understanding Kew's role in botanical colonialism. In 1867, Henry Wickham stole 70,000 seeds from the Para region of Brazil, transporting them by steamship to Kew. Once sprouted, the seedlings were carried in Wardian Cases to British colonies in Malay and Ceylon, establishing the rubber plantation industry that enabled mass industrialization in the Global North through mass exploitation of people and land.
02: Notes on Botanical Displacement (a cut-and-paste poem)
This poem, using cutting from Kew's seasonal magazine and a leftist film brochure, critiques the way Kew presents itself as a conservation institution, often rooted in a saviorism mentality.
03: Seed “Bomb” Manual (digital drawing)
This short manual contains a recipe for making seed “bombs” and suggests how they may be dispersed in London's gated gardens as a tool of resistance.
04: Millennium Seed Bank as Ruins (digital drawing)
This drawing imagines a future where the MSB — sometimes called the "most biodiverse place on Earth" as it contains over 2 billion seeds — has become a ruin, and its seeds are freed from their frozen vaults to grow toward the sun.
05: Rematriating Plantago Major (digital drawing)
This excerpt is from a short graphic novel, which imagines that Plantago Major (broadleaf plantain) seeds are stolen from the MSB and brought to a community garden in London, re-establishing traditional herbalism practices with the plant.
06: A Field Guide to the Botanical Imaginary (mixed media)
The project culminated in an audio tour and field guide of Kew Gardens that ties together its colonial legacies and imagines reparative futures.
07: Botanical Reparations (ink on paper)
This illustration imagines a diasporic community garden uprooting the manicured lawns in front of the Palm House at Kew.
Leela Keshav is a Canadian-mixed-desi graduate student at the Architectural Association in London. Her current research examines the coloniality of botany, the rematriation of seeds, and more-than-human reciprocity. She is a member of New Architecture Writers and has had writing and illustrations published in the Chutney Magazine and BRIDGE Waterloo Architecture.
