A Collaboration with Kew Gardens

Focussing specifically on the Cape Floral Kingdom’s succulents, A Succulent Affair is a mixed media project that entangles the succulent and its living environment with colonial plant ownership, imperial collecting and the cyberspace systems that keep the market profitable.

This project holds a mirror up to the ever-present cycle of botanical fashionable firsts and exotic plant ownership.

________________________________________________________

Fads and trends in plants are as old as the economy of botany, with technological advances working alongside industry to find new and profitable ways to sustain the market demands and control natural resources.

One of these technologies is photography, which, since its inception has been utilised to document, categorise and exoticize nature. During lockdown, houseplants had a massive resurgence with succulents topping the international market as the latest must-have botanical. The succulent plant market doubled in two years and is projected to reach £6.82 Billion by 2027 (Verified Market Research, 2021).

These exoticized, living ornaments are now either mass-produced or are in-demand collectables. Instagram is flooded with images of plant babies and Marketplace and Etsy have sellers propagating from cuttings. Micropropagation labs are cultivating in test tubes which high streets sell for as little as £1. As plants enter the high streets, true collectors seek more unique species.

The global trade in endangered and rare plants is considered one of the world’s largest criminal sectors with some succulents selling on the web for thousands of pounds. (FloraGuard report 2020).

Technology and botany are linked in a cat and mouse game of selling and tracking, finding and protecting, geotagging and AI mapping. The media is feasts on the plant poaching story and often links it to fad loving millennials and the digital age, yet this reductive. Fads are not separate from culture and from those who create and track the platforms that sustain them. And they are not separate from history.

Fads, trends and tech need context. It is important to remember the role of imperial botanical collectors and to scrutinise the systems that are creating the systems to safeguard nature. And to look at who is profiting, controlling, owning and who is not.