When we landed in Christchurch, my sister and her family were waiting for us inside the airport. The boys made posters. I cried on the escalator. I feel nervous being this far away from my kids. My sister knows that tea and trees help me calm down. Both can be found at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens. So we drove there before going home.
I love botanic gardens. I love the little information plaques in front of each planting. I love walking under a banyan tree from India just a few steps before crouching to look at Iceland's low-growing plants. But I know that the type of botanic gardens I love are cultural artifacts of a cruel past.
They were developed alongside European colonization. Ships full of European men landed all over the world, claiming land, people and seeds. The seeds were sent back to Europe to grow in unfit soil, in garden segments named for conquered lands. Monarchs rarely traveled to their colonies. They just strolled through their royal botanic gardens to survey their dominion.
In 1768, the British government ordered James Cook to find places the British could colonize. He sailed to many islands, including the ones we call New Zealand. Kew Gardens, the royal botanic gardens in London, were first planted with seeds sent back from this mission. The British declared sovereignty over New Zealand in 1840.
They did not care that the Māori People had been on the islands since at least 1300 CE. They did not care that the Māori did not consent to be subjects to the British crown.
The first tree was planted in the Christchurch Botanic Gardens in 1867, just 27 years after the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi). The tree was an oak, put into the ground to commemorate a marriage between a Prince of Wales and a Princess of Denmark.
A 1915 article in The Sun explains, “the gardens were the means of introducing many English and foreign trees to the country - oaks, ash, elms, sycamores, pines in 20 or 30 varieties, and many others.” The gardens were far from a water source and the soil was full of shingle that would not hold moisture. And so water had to be, “carted in…an arduous process.”
The article does not say who carted the water in.
Like many colonial botanic gardens, Christchurch Gardens were used to euroform the land. The 1915 newspaper article claimed that “in one year, 250,000 trees were distributed from the Gardens for various places in the province. Naturally, a large percentage of those trees were planted in and around Christchurch.”
Botanic gardens are now usually much more concerned with conservation than empire. There is usually an emphasis on restoring native plants and replenishing exhausted soil. The best ones have tried to become centers of regeneration. The plaques in the Christchurch Botanic Gardens visitor center told me these are the priorities of these botanic gardens, too. As an outsider, I cannot tell you whether that is true. But I hope it is.
I followed my nephews through the garden from one favorite spot to another. It was all so beautiful. They saved the best for last. A giant redwood. Planted in 1869 by the Duke of Edinburgh, the first member of the British Royal Family to visit the Christchurch Botanic Garden. That duke should never have been on this island. And this tree shouldn’t be here either. It is native to my home, California. (Another place I do not belong.) But I cried with joy when I saw it. And I was happy that people in Christchurch get to sit under a Sequoiadendron giganteum.
We lingered for a minute, looking up. I fretted about my joy in this tree.
I don’t know how to move in this world, where so many of us are all in places we were never supposed to be, under trees that should never have been planted, on land that has been changed in ways that may never be repaired.
On the drive to his house, my seven-year-old nephew told mewhat he’d been learning about his new home.
“When the English came, they tried to take everything from the Māori, even their language! Which is also called Māori. But you can’t just take language from people. They keep it! I am learning Māori at school now. Can I tell you some of the words?”
I told him there was nothing I’d like better in the whole entire world.
Pocket Observatory by Meg Conley is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
