Interpreting the Indigenous and Imported Heritage of Medicinal and Culinary Plant Use in St. Vincent through the Gardens of John Nero and Alexander Anderson

Abstract

This paper explores how two very different “heritage” gardens on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent hold a mirror to the rich and complex socio-cultural and botanical history of the wider Caribbean region, reflecting the different approaches to the historic cultivation and exploitation of indigenous and imported plant resources for culinary and medicinal ends. We start with a consideration of a small-scale gardening project in the village of Greiggs undertaken by John Nero, a Garifuna (“Black Carib”). This venture acts as a focus of a local community heritage and educational initiative, and attempts to reflect an emic view on the authenticity of Garifuna culinary and medicinal plant use. The second case, the botanical garden in Kingstown (one of the oldest botanical gardens in the New World and associated with the Scottish botanist Dr. Alexander Anderson d.1811) offers a distinct contrast, and is considered as a modernist, colonialist, and etic project, reflecting the botanical heritage of the Caribbean in the context of a global imperialist crossroads, and as a tool for a formalized scientific research. The two gardens differ in terms of scale, history, and cultural background but both are intimately connected to the themes of migration, colonization, resistance, and post-colonial socio-economic development seen through an ethnobotanical lens on this small and under-researched Caribbean island.