Emma Nicolson
In curating within a botanic institution, I came to understand that the work was not only spatial or programmatic; it was epistemological. At the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), the archive spills across glasshouses and herbarium drawers, botanical illustrations and colonial field notes, plantings and policies, a layered and living inheritance four centuries deep. Developing an expanded arts strategy within this context meant reckoning with the histories embedded in the Garden’s living and archival collections. It involved working within a structure shaped by centuries of classification, extractivism and empire, while seeking new frameworks for care, relation and cultural accountability.
This work required learning how to dwell within contradiction. Botanical gardens are often imagined as tranquil places, detached from politics. Yet many such gardens were constructed during the height of the empire, serving as scientific laboratories and distribution centres for colonial extraction. Founded in 1670, during a time of plague, famine and witch trials, RBGE began as a utilitarian garden for apothecaries. That history is foundational. And while the Garden is now a centre for ecological science and conservation, it still bears the imprint of the systems that shaped it, systems that continue to marginalise Indigenous knowledge and worldviews.
To work meaningfully within this space, I began to understand the site as a network of coordinates: the herbarium, the archive, the glasshouses, the scientific staff, the plants, the policies and the silences. My role as curator was to attend to the multiplicity of voices and temporalities already present and to create conditions for dialogue, reflection and disruption. This work was shaped by artists, writers and thinkers who offered both critical tools and emotional resonance.
This process also meant identifying and working with what I came to think of as ‘the willing’: those within and outwith the institution who were open to dialogue, challenge and co-creation. RBGE, like any long-standing institution, holds deep reserves of expertise, and part of my curatorial practice involved recognising and collaborating with individuals who carried specialist knowledge and a commitment to care, from herbarium staff and horticulturists to archivists and scientific researchers. Rather than positioning curating as something brought in from outside, I tried to develop an embedded and responsive approach, one that could move with institutional knowledge, not against it, while still holding space for necessary critique.
The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the radical clarity of Museum Detox and the leadership of figures such as Sara Wajid provided crucial provocations. Listening to Sushma Jansari’s Wonder House podcast, rooted in decolonial and people-centred museum practice, helped situate my own questions within a broader community of care and transformation. These voices reminded me that botanical institutions like RBGE carry within them both immense value and unresolved harm, and that any meaningful cultural practice must navigate these tensions with humility and a willingness to be challenged.
Authors such as Angela Saini, Claire Ratinon and Amanda Thomson furthered my understanding of the deep entanglement of race, land, science and story. Their work sharpened my curatorial responsibility, not as the selection or arrangement of content, but as the cultivation of relations between past and present, institution and community, art and action. Within this context, I began to engage with the idea of feminising the Enlightenment — a way of questioning whose reason, whose progress, and whose rights were upheld in that era, and of opening up space for layered perspectives, contradictions, and grounded, situated ways of knowing.
This curatorial turn was not a fixed pivot but a slow reorientation, away from institution-led narratives and towards co-authored, research-driven processes. It acknowledged that interpretation alone is not enough. The structures framing knowledge must also be made visible, questioned and, where necessary, dismantled.
Plants on Paper grew directly from this methodology. RBGE holds over 20,000 botanical artworks, originally produced for scientific study but now charged with other kinds of potential. This project asked what happens when we treat these illustrations not only as tools of taxonomy, but as documents of cultural memory, political violence, and artistic complexity. What kinds of new tools might be forged from this shift in perspective — not only for institutional display and narrative, but for artists to read, respond to, or rethink the archive altogether?
To curate within a botanical institution is to be continually reminded that knowledge does not begin in the archive, but in the soil, the weather, the breath of a glasshouse. These sites are not neutral. They are porous, contested, and alive. The herbarium and the gallery are not parallel spaces, but overlapping worlds, each staging a version of what is valued, remembered, and forgotten. I came to understand this not as a curatorial position, but as a methodology: working with the willing, dwelling within contradiction, and cultivating plural forms of attention.
At the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, I began not with a programme, but with a process — an attunement to what was already present. I worked with the willing: archivists, librarians, herbarium curators, botanists, horticulturists, artists and educators. Those who understood that a garden is never neutral. It was through working alongside them that the institution began to unfold for me as a meshwork of relationships, between people and plants, between the structures of classification and the quieter gestures of resistance.
In this context, the archive was never a singular site. It spread across drying presses and colonial field journals, botanical illustrations and uncatalogued boxes, eucalyptus leaves inked into paper. It required more than research — it required a kind of dwelling. One that recognised that plants are not simply specimens but actors, witnesses, participants in human and more-than-human histories. That the word “native,” for instance, can describe a plant’s ecological status, while also functioning as a tool of exclusion, control, erasure. These slippages matter. They remind us that language, like taxonomy, is never innocent.
My methodology emerged from this tension: curating not as display, but as re-worlding. Not as a search for fixed positions, but as the slow cultivation of coordinates, plural, provisional, situated. I was less interested in representation than in relation. Less concerned with telling a story than in holding space for many. Within this cosmopolitical ecology — to borrow from Isabelle Stengers — the curator becomes less a narrator and more a facilitator of encounter. A companion to contradiction. An agent of care.
As we navigate the climate emergency and ongoing crises of equity and representation, I believe curating can offer a practice of listening, reimagining and repair. At RBGE, this work has taken many forms, from Climate House to artist residencies to the evolving work of Plants on Paper. Each shares a common thread: an attempt to cultivate conditions for critical reflection, to centre voices of the global majority, and to reframe the botanical archive as a cultural landscape we must collectively and carefully rethink.
A generative example of this approach emerged through my collaboration with the artist Keg de Souza. Her engagement with the archive centred on the story of Eucalyptus, a plant with global roots and colonial entanglements. Through our research together, we were able to connect herbarium specimens, nature prints, and botanical illustrations held in the collection — each representing Eucalyptus cinerea from different vantage points. One of these, a watercolour painted by the Indian artist Govindoo in 1859, offers a rare named attribution. Govindoo, like many unnamed botanical artists employed by the East India Company’s surgeon-botanists, Hugh Cleghorn included, was commissioned to document the flora of the subcontinent through the lens of European science. His work sits alongside plant specimens collected by Hugh Cleghorn, a Scottish forester trained at RBGE and later appointed Conservator of Forests in the Madras Presidency. These layers — Mughal painting traditions, colonial forestry, herbarium conservation, co-exist in the archive, revealing how knowledge was systematised, extracted and aestheticised. Keg’s work opened a space to examine these traces not as neutral records, but as sites of colonial encounter, artistic labour and ecological translation.
Another object that continues to resonate with me is A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, held in the RBGE library. Compiled in the late nineteenth century by George Watt, it is an encyclopaedic catalogue of plants valued for their commercial potential under British rule. The entries are exhaustive and systematic, yet what is striking is the framework itself: a taxonomy driven by imperial utility, with Indigenous names and knowledge included only when legible to colonial science. It is a document of botanical knowledge, yes, but also of extraction and erasure. Returning to this book with artists and researchers enables us to see how the archive can serve not only as a record of what was known, but as evidence of how knowledge was taken, sorted and redeployed in the service of the empire. It is through such encounters that my curatorial practice found purpose not to condemn the archive, but to make its structures visible and to explore where new relations might be made.
To work this way within a 354 -year-old scientific institution was not always comfortable. There were points of resistance, often subtle, sometimes overt, a sense that art was ornamental, that questions of power and care sat outside the bounds of botany. There could be moments of refusal and friction, it challenged the institution to recognise that artistic inquiry could hold epistemic weight, not merely interpretive value. Some colleagues questioned the relevance of artists in a scientific garden; others resisted decolonial framing as politically uncomfortable. But these moments were instructive. They revealed the assumptions embedded in institutional culture, and the necessity of reworking them. Where transformation did occur, it was through collaborative processes: and interdisciplinary connections. Small, reciprocal gestures, of trust, of recognition, of curiosity, allowed a methodology to take shape. They pointed toward a broader reimagining of the Garden’s role: not as a site of preservation alone, but as a space for cultural accountability and shared inquiry.