gardens | botanical rio de janeiro by mariana mogilevich Native Species collecting, exploiting, displaying, preserving
colonialism legitimacy cultural politics
exclusion patrimony
1808 When Napoleon’s troops crossed into Portugal from Spain in late 1807, Portugal’s Prince Regent Dom João VI and the entire Portuguese Court set sail for Rio de Janeiro. Almost overnight, Rio, a sleepy colonial city of some forty to sixty thousand people, became the capital of the Portuguese Empire. In the eyes of the new arrivals, Rio was a backwater lacking any of the requisite urban character and amenities. To transform the city into one befitting its new status was a formidable task. The first stage of Rio’s modernisation was the importation of major institutions. The city’s first year as capital saw the birth of a public library, the Royal Arsenal, a medical school, an astronomical observatory, the Bank of Brazil, and on the outskirts of the city, the Royal Botanical Garden, or Real Jardim Botânico. That same year, Prince Regent Dom João VI was presented with the first foreign plant species for the garden. Luiz de Abreu Vieira e Silva, a corsair who had been captured by the French and imprisoned in Mauritius, escaped to Rio, smuggling back with him a trove of seeds. Thus nutmeg, avocado, lychee, cinnamon and grapefruit became among the garden’s first holdings, along with Roystonea oleraceae , a palm tree native to the West Indies. Dom João planted this one with his own hands, and
the palma mater , as the first specimen was christened, eventually grew to a height of 38.7 metres, towering over the garden. Hundreds of additional palms were planted along the main axis extending from the garden’s gate. This allée of ten-storey trees became the Real Jardim Botânico’s most distinctive feature, sketched by nineteenth century visitors and reproduced on postcards. Thus a foreign specimen became the garden’s symbol, an unlikely interloper at the helm of a land already profoundly associated with its own abundant and exotic tropical nature. In its early days, the garden’s nation- building functions were more practical than symbolic. It began as part gunpowder factory, part acclimatisation garden: both establishments served a strictly economic role. The Real Jardim Botânico was for the importation and acclimatisation of new species for cultivation and profit in Brazil. One early successful experiment was with tea. Imported from China in 1810, along with a number of Chinese knowledgeable in its cultivation, the crop took well to the soil, and soon the Real Jardim Botânico was supplying tea for much of the city of Rio.
Outside the garden walls, tropical nature was a major Brazilian export. Naturalists and collectors flocked to the Amazon in search of exotic plants, for scientific investigation and to supply European botanical gardens and their need for exciting nature. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were at least a thousand European agents searching for exotic plants in mid-Atlantic Brazil alone; a single British firm was importing between 100,000 and 200,000 orchids a year. While foreign capital and expertise extracted value from Brazilian nature outside, the fortunes of the Botanical Garden were less impressive. Many visitors complained that its collections and research failed to live up to its name or to the richness of plants in the vicinity. ca. 1898 Into the fray stepped João Rodrigues Barbosa, an accomplished botanist who became the garden’s director in 1890 and saw himself as its saviour. In his own mythology, at the time the park was more like a forest, whose ‘promiscuous specimens were not indicated by a plaque, a label, or a simple sign which would identify them. It was all very nice to look at but, scientifically speaking, in deplorable shape’.
all images from Rio: 141 Hectáreas, a video currently in production
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On Site review 20: archives and museums
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