Offering a micro-history of the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town, From Hedge to Living Bridge situates the botanical garden in the context of colonial botany and local and global struggles to decolonize space and place. At the time of its establishment in 1913, the botanical garden was imagined as a vehicle to promote white South African nationalism. During the apartheid era, the state deployed the botanical garden in international image campaigns to counter international isolation. In the post-apartheid period, the botanical garden attempted to transform its colonial and apartheid displays to accommodate the new democratic nation. 

Melanie Boehi reveals that while the botanical garden was designed as a white space, Black people always claimed belonging to it, as it was built on land shaped by Indigenous presence, slavery, and apartheid forced removals. 

Drawing from multispecies ethnography, Boehi expands the conventional concept of the archive to include the landscape and the garden’s plants. While the botanical garden was imagined as a colonial tool of separation, it also has the potential to function as a living bridge between people who were segregated by colonialism and apartheid, as well as between humans and nonhuman nature.

Melanie Boehi is Head of Public Outreach at the Geneva Botanic Garden.