Embrangled Banks

David Toomey delights in Banu Subramaniam’s “Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism.”

By David ToomeyMarch 27, 2025

• Science & Technology

IN THE FINAL CHAPTER of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin predicts that his theory of natural selection, over time, will bring forth entirely new fields of inquiry and even new sciences. Banu Subramaniam’s Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (2024) is, among other things, a realization of that prediction. It reexamines natural selection while extending its insights into areas of inquiry perhaps unimaginable to Darwin in 1859.

The final paragraph of Origin begins by inviting us to consider an “entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” The image prefigures the sciences of ecological systems. Darwin may not have appreciated just how entangled that bank is. Subramaniam—whose preferred word, carrying a slightly more troubled valence, is “embrangled”—shows how deeply layered and unimaginably complex those connections are. For her, that bank is embrangled not only with organisms but also with the legacies of colonialism, conceptions and misconceptions of gender and binaries, traditions of scientific practice, and language itself.

¤

In academe of late, there has been much concern with and encouragement for interdisciplinarity. C. P. Snow’s well-known lecture “The Two Cultures” still reverberates—if anything, ever more sonorously—nearly 70 years after its delivery. And so scholars and researchers make concerted efforts to collaborate with others in fields not their own and sometimes—if they are lucky—arrive at new insights they could not have made themselves. But crossing disciplines is difficult, and to do it well is no small feat. At its worst, the push to interdisciplinarity invites a misplaced confidence, an “I can do quantum physics in my kitchen sink” attitude that is unlikely to yield meaningful insights into quantum physics—or, for that matter, kitchen sinks. Still, even scholars approaching a new field with caution and humility may come away with little to show for their efforts. Participants in interdisciplinary conferences can be like strangers sitting side by side on a train, engaging in polite and amicable conversation for the duration of the journey, and at its end departing in different directions, never to meet or speak again.

Subramaniam’s work arrives as a welcome tonic. She, or rather her perspective, is in many ways the very embodiment of interdisciplinarity, and she shares bits of her personal history that helped produce it. Reading, we learn of her childhood in India in an urban neighborhood largely absent of greenery yet populated by an Indian child’s imagined world of interconnected deities, demons, animals, and plants. We learn of her undergraduate studies in India, where she was immersed in a decidedly Western curriculum, a legacy of colonialism; and of her work in a graduate program in the United States and her investigation into the color variation of morning glories, with moments of profound disappointment (a year’s research lost due to cutworms) and sheer sublimity (seeing the flowers adorning a meadow in their purples, whites, and pinks). We read of her growing discomfort with the structures of traditional scientific practice, and her eventual realization that the all-too-common conception of science as entirely dispassionate and free of attitudes, behavior, and unspoken rules—its “culture of no culture”—is a misleading figment of the collective scientific imagination. We are made to understand that the most significant moment in her scholarly career is a chance encounter with a feminist scholar who introduced her to the field of science and technology studies (STS), which examines the social, cultural, and historical aspects of science and technology. It occasioned a kind of epiphany in which she connected diversity, a term much used in gender studies, to variation, a term essential to evolutionary biology. It came, too, with a realization that the choice between botany and feminism is a false choice—that the two fields are, a priori, interdependent. The moment unsettled her career and led her to transform, revitalize, and redirect it.

All of this leads into a history of botany that most textbooks, to our collective disadvantage, omit. European maritime expeditions in the 16th and 17th centuries revealed to European botanists an abundance and variety of life they regarded as in need of ordering and naming. And so was born Western nomenclature, classification, and taxonomy. Of course, the “discoveries” those botanists and their emissaries made were discoveries only to themselves; the species were well known to natives. Botany’s colonial legacy endures: the new, European names supplanted the originals and became the names by which most are known today, even in their places of origin. Subramaniam notes that herbaria collections in the US and Europe, and especially nations with histories as colonizers, are far larger than those in, say, African nations. And—irony added to irony—the biodiversity of places that were colonized greatly exceeds that of the nations that colonized them. She relates how Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and others applied—or rather, projected—18th-century European ideas of sex and gender to plants. That legacy, too, survives. To this day, schoolchildren are taught that flowers have male and female genders and are introduced to pistils and stamens as equivalents of human sexual organs. Subramaniam notes that such conceptions are almost criminally misleading. Modes of reproduction in the plant kingdom are not binary, she explains, but far more diverse. She makes a compelling case that plants do not have sex. And she observes that the xenophobic anxieties surrounding immigration and invasive species make for a telling parallel.

¤

The book is infused with the kind of facts that many readers are likely to recall and introduce later in casual conversation. I was surprised to learn that many species celebrated as emblematic of a place are non-native to the place in question. Tumbleweed, for instance, an icon of the American West, was brought to South Dakota by Russian refugees in the 1870s. Georgia’s peaches and the cherry blossoms of Washington, DC, are likewise arrivistes. And yet other non-native species—zebra mussels and kudzu—are reviled and subject to programs of eradication. But here again, Subramaniam rejects simplistic histories: in this case, those that depict invasive species as colonizers and enemies of Indigenous, local cultures. The reality is subtle and complex.

Since Botany of Empire is a work from an academic press by an author who holds a PhD in zoology and genetics and now is a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies, a reader might expect the prose to be dense and laced with specialized language and concepts. That reader would be happily mistaken. Language and concepts that may be unfamiliar to a layperson are introduced carefully and clearly. Still, the book calls for slow reading—not because it’s “difficult,” but because many of the ideas presented are so fresh. I found myself finishing a paragraph and looking up from the page, taking a deep breath and staring into space for a minute to let the idea at hand settle in. It also demands slow reading because the prose is beautifully crafted: I reread many sentences and paragraphs for no reason other than to savor their sheer elegance. The book’s one-and-a-half-page prologue, a rumination framed as a series of rhetorical questions on how to tell a difficult history, might be a prose poem.

Botany of Empire puts interdisciplinarity into practice with a greater reach than even Snow might have wished for; it ventures, at times, into fiction. The book is divided into five sections. Each contains two chapters written in a lively but otherwise traditional academic style, and two “interludes.” The latter are brief works of speculative fiction, thought experiments, and descriptions of imagined futures reminiscent of Borges’s short stories or—perhaps a nearer parallel from another scientific discipline—Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams (1992). In these interludes, Subramaniam’s wit is on full display. One features the “Queer Vegennials,” a group of young people working to liberate botany from its colonial past by rejecting the reductive frameworks imposed by Linnaeus et al. and acknowledging plants’ diversity. Noting that cacti do not have leaves, paintbrush do not photosynthesize, and epiphytes trap water and nutrients from the air, the Queer Vegennials see plants as models that might, by example, teach us to discover and celebrate our own differences. The banyan tree—which produces aerial roots that grow downward, take root, and grow into new trees—inspires the Queer Vegennials’ “Banyan Project,” a cooperative whose new branches are “self-sufficient, […] nonhierarchical, [and] directionless.” Similarly, the Dungowan bush tomato—a single plant with all manner of flowers, staminate, pistillate, bisexual, and thus capable of “every […] mode of reproduction imaginable”—inspires the Queer Vegennials’ “Dungowan Project,” designed to promote and nurture human communities with parents of many sexes and genders practicing many sorts of kinships. And the interactions of the cuckoo plant—which many know by the colloquial name jack-in-the-pulpit, as it lures insects into its pitcher—influences the “Cuckoo Project,” which encourages communities that are based on alliance and play, behaviors long marginalized and even shunned in evolutionary biology. All of these projects, like the Queer Vegennials themselves, are of course imagined, and perhaps fantastical. But in Subramaniam’s hands, imagination, especially informed imagination, proves a tool both useful and necessary.

¤

To repair the world, Subramaniam writes, we’ll need to understand not only what is broken, but also how it was broken. Only then can we begin to decolonize it and decenter the history of the last several centuries as it has been taught. Botany of Empire is a call to reexamine and revise, and even to write an entirely new history of those centuries, with plants at its center. It’s also a call to begin a reparation. If that reparation is to be successful, it will require efforts of many kinds and on many scales. It will ask, for instance, that we end the practice of “‘parachute’ science,” in which botanists appear in a place only to collect a specimen and return it to their laboratories, having gained no understanding of the bank in which the plant had been embrangled. It will ask that that we count local knowledge as science. And it will ask that we understand that decolonization will take time and require patience. The prospect may be dismaying, since to unlearn and relearn is challenging. But such efforts have their own rewards and pleasures. And like that vision of morning glories, learning, even difficult learning, can be joyous.

Botany of Empire arrives at an opportune moment. As I write this in March 2025, the Trump administration is working to restrict or eliminate funding in much government-supported research. The National Science Foundation, the agency that provides roughly a quarter of federal support to American colleges and universities, expects to cut half of its workforce, with losses that will likely have devastating consequences. Recently as well, Trump issued Executive Order 14168, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” It defines “sex” as an “individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female” and calls for various actions to remove “gender identity” protections across the government and in the private sector.

Against this disturbing backdrop, Botany of Empire is both a clarion call and an inspiration. In its decentering of humans and centering of plants, it brings a welcome perspective, reminding us that banyan trees, Dungowan bush tomatoes, and cuckoo plants are still out there—with no regard for Executive Order 14168—doing what they do. And, as Subramaniam suggests, they are showing us the way.