Archival records held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew offer valuable sources to explore the history of colonial forestry in nineteenth-century Jamaica.
Against this backdrop of Empire Forestry and increasing concern about the impact of deforestation on the island, one tree began its journey towards bearing the national fruit of Jamaica. A monument to the people enslaved on the grounds of the University of the West Indies campus in Kingston, Jamaica, acknowledges that groves of ackee trees act as ‘botanical markers’ of former slave villages.
This use of the ackee tree as a long-term memorial of enslavement demonstrates the role of trees as sites of cultural memory and how ackee became the principal botanical symbol of Jamaican identity. However, there is scarcely any discussion of ackee in Kew’s archives, an absence which is connected to the tree’s long association with resistance to colonial exploitation.
Drawing on representations of ackee in art and literature to fill these archival absences, this talk will uncover the cultural history of a tree bearing a potentially poisonous fruit, growing beyond the colonial spaces of the plantation and botanic garden.
Heather Craddock recently received her PhD in English Literature from the University of Roehampton and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Her project, ‘Kew’s Colonial Archive: A Plant Humanities Approach to the Caribbean Miscellaneous Reports, 1850-1928’, examined Kew’s colonial heritage and the histories of botanic gardens, forests, and plantations in Jamaica. She co-curated an exhibition at Kew in 2023 about the history of forest conservation and deforestation, entitled ‘Uprooted’.
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