Join Katharina Massing and Jen Ridding for an online talk exploring how Birmingham Botanical Gardens is working with local communities and visitors to highlight its colonial connections and diversify voices within plant interpretation.
Birmingham Botanical Gardens was founded in 1832, originally as a site of botanical and horticultural research and later with a greater emphasis on leisure and wellbeing.
Similar to many Botanic Gardens, its collection is linked to colonial expansion and trade. These links can be observed throughout the site, for example through the economic plants in the glass houses or the ornamental plants from China at the Wilson border, named after the ‘plant hunter’ Ernest Henry Wilson who brought plants over to the UK.
Katharina Massing and Jen Ridding will look at how the garden is working with local communities and visitors to highlight some of these colonial connections and diversify voices within plant interpretation.
Free – open to everyone.
Taking place online via YouTube.
Plants Beyond Empire is a new series of conversations starting in February 2024, as part of our Formations programme, in partnership with the Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. The events will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond.
Katharina Massing is a museum and heritage expert interested in holistic approaches to the safeguarding of landscape and traditional knowledge and sustainable heritage practices. She teaches and researches on ways museums can engage with and communicate anthropogenic changes. At the moment she is involved in a project between Nottingham Trent University and Birmingham Botanical Gardens that investigates diversifying ways in which plant stories are told.
Jen Ridding is currently the Head of Engagement & Learning at Birmingham Botanical Gardens. A dynamic cultural leader, Jen is experienced in strategic development of Learning, Audience Development, Engagement and Visitor Services. Skilled in bringing people, stories and ideas together, Jen has a successful track record in designing innovative engagement strategies across a range of arts, heritage and culture settings.
Photo credit: Birmingham Botanical Garden (2024). Photo courtesy of Katharina Massing