The long road to today; sugar, cotton and the crimes of Bristol’s past

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By Andy Winfield

Plants and our history are strongly interwoven, they can evoke personal memories or a collective love of symbolic trees, flowers, scents and sounds; each plant has journeyed side by side with us, our experiences combining to tell a story of our past. Some of these plants have a fleeting appearance, whereas others are so linked with human history that their very mention evokes a deep historical trauma reverberating across continents. This week saw Bristol protestors topple the statue of Colston in the centre of Bristol, one of many men of this city who grew rich through the production of sugar and the selling of African people into slavery. This blog will look at two plants grown in our Tropical zone whose natural adaptations stirred the worst in human greed and brutality, building this city and creating the race divisions we see today. (more…)

The Impossible Garden

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By Andy Winfield

Luke Jerram sits casually dressed on an over-sized picnic bench in the Botanic Garden
Luke Jerram on one of his exhibits.

We’ve always felt that art and the Garden work well together. Every Easter we run a sculpture exhibition which brings this home, plants and art are good friends; nature’s sculpture makes the Garden a gallery and placing human art amongst it embellishes both. With this in mind, for some time we’ve wanted to show a permanent summer exhibition but nothing has fit the bill. (more…)

The gobbledegook on plant labels explained.

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By Nicola ‘Froggie’ Rathbone

If you visit the garden regularly you may have noticed that the green vinyl we normally scribble plant names on with a big black indelible marker pen are being replaced with black and white vinyl. They look pretty much like engraved labels but are far cheaper and easier to replace when a name changes. This has happened quite a number of times since the 1990’s when botanists began looking at the DNA of plants and decided that some have been misnamed….. (more…)