Plants Soil is a substrate, owned and worked to support agricultural production, the building of cities and provision for extractive industries. The management of soil to support a range of plant species deemed agriculturally useful ran into many of the problems of colonisation generally. New crops, a factor at the very root of colonial extraction led to plantation cultures, mono-cultures in managed forests and strategic imporation of plants as soil management. The nurturing of useful plant species has its own special architecture dedicated to the transport and nurturing of flora and inadvertent fauna that upends soils, fields and farms as the stable entities of place and identity. the nursery Plant nurseries produce soft building materials. Trees, shrubs and groundcovers are grown to scalable dimensions, supplying living matter for installation. A nursery is a surface of preparation. It holds plants in an in-between state, long enough to be sized, stabilised and made ready for placement elsewhere. Plants enter as seeds, cuttings, grafts or tissue cultures and leave as standardised units, wrapped in soil, contained and tagged. Plants circulate between propagation houses, growing fields and wholesale yards: they move through trays, pots, root balls and pallets. Plants are prepared to appear finished at the moment they are placed on site. Plants are soft matter. The Victorian era developed many devices for introducing new plant species that might be agriculturally significant, or merely entertaining. One was the Wardian Case: sealed plants inside glass atmospheres, suspending soil, moisture and air long enough to cross oceans, holding living matter in transit, neither fully alive nor dormant, stabilised just enough to arrive intact. Once unpacked, exotic flora were displayed in gardens, greenhouses and exhibitions. World fairs and arboreta were like giant Wardian cases: sites that assembled living collections, new hybrids and cross-pollinated species in highly curated grounds where plant growth could be studied and named. Such open-air nurseries held living matter in extended suspension, preparing it for further movement across landscapes. the root ball Transportable units of soil, roots and moisture, wrapped in burlap, wire, crates, or boxes, the import and trade of root balls allow living matter to move between nurseries, exhibitions, construction sites, landscapes and continents. Here, the nursery, the border and the laboratory collapse into a shared surface where living building materials are sorted, admitted or refused. Roots move through regimes of inspection. At ports and borders, soil and roots pass through inspection stations, incineration pits and laboratories where living matter is screened, delayed, burned or expelled. Containment is never complete. Japanese beetles crossed the Pacific in soil attached to iris rhizomes shipped for the 1876 Philadelphia World’s Fair. Asian longhorned beetles later arrived in wooden crates of poplar timber. Insects, fungi and microbes foil enclosure; what comes to be labelled invasive is often the residue of architectural circulation. Wrapped, sealed and specified, root balls appear stable; their contents remain provisional. Living substrates are never inert architectural matter.
Gray Herbarium Library, Harvard
Victoria and Albert Museum
from the top: Wardian Case for moving plants on long sea voyages, from Ward’s On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases , 1852. The Crystal Palace, Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, London, 1851. A Wardian Case ispositioned adjacent to the large tree at the centre. below: The burning of diseased cherry trees. On January 28, 1910, two thousand cherry trees sent from Tokyo as a diplomatic gift were burned in Washington DC just three days after arrival. The trees were destroyed under USDA entomologist Charles L. Marlatt’s orders, who feared they carried foreign diseases and pests, and warned that ‘unknown dangers lurk in every shipment to America’.
US National Arboretum Archive
56 on site review 48 :: building materials
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