After the Bounty: Botany and Botanical Tropes

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the representation of plants and gardens in a cross-section of postcolonial texts. It is a particularly interesting area of investigation for the present study, because botanical tropes figure prominently in both postcolonial writing and postcolonial theoretical discourse: terms such as ‘hybridity’, ‘cross-pollination’, ‘transplantation’ and ‘rhizome’ have played an important part in the lexicon of critics such as Homi Bhabha and Edouard Glissant. The use of such tropes is, however, nothing new—it has notable antecedents in colonial discourse and was central to Darwinian and other Victorian commentary on cultural interaction—and so it seems relevant to ask whether and, if so, to what extent their employment in postcolonial contexts departs from ways in which they have customarily been used elsewhere. I offer a tentative answer to this question at the end of the chapter. The first section reviews Anglophone Caribbean representations of the breadfruit and considers ambiguities in the textual depiction of mangoes and orchids in the work of writers from the region. The chapter then extends its discussion of horticultural practices into a consideration of postcolonial responses to the garden and gardening, locating these within the context of an account of some of the significances that have historically been associated with the concept of the garden.