Gardening: race, history and Empire – James Wong
Gardening: race, history and Empire – James Wong
James Wong is a botanist, gardener and TV presenter.
For last few months, he has been drawn into the culture wars, which have emerged ever since murder of George Floyd. (Subscribe: https://bit.ly/C4_News_Subscribe)
In the wake of the judgment of the Derek Chauvin murder trail, Krishnan talks to James about the existence of racism and classicism within the gardening world and how he thinks we need to readdress diversity within UK gardening culture.
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So fascinating how one man is killed Minneapolis and all of a sudden British gardens are racist.
Its all to do with civilising society. Nothing to do with skin colour. Cultivating beauty and working hand in hand with God’s nature beats letting things go to ruin every time !☺
Wow the culture warriors are just soo easily triggered these days. All you have to do is mention racism or sexism, and gods forbid you even stand next to a trans person, and suddenly you’re being cancelled everywhere for apparently trying to singlehandedly tear down the very fabric of civilisation.
People can be racist and people make up society and everything in it and potentially carry it with them. What people are getting bored with is the constant. This is racist, and this is racist and this is, etc, on and on. Sure there may be truth in it, but because it can be said about everything it’s a never ending story.
Wtf has George Floyd got anything to do with this?
gardening is officially racist now guys
I understand completely James Wong’s point about heritage varieties or native plants and the mis-appropriation of the meaning. Yes, how can I accept that the gardening style of a large house owned by the landed upper class when my ancestors were agricultural workers who probably at best had a small vegetable patch to sustain them. Saying that as a vegetable gardener I need to take from some of that past knowledge of sometimes quite recent seed producers that was born from that era of great houses in Britain. So I might use some of the varieties that worked in the vegetable gardens of the great houses of Britain. I think that the way that I use heritage is about protecting old varieties (that may not be British varieties). That is to protect the diversity of seed varieties against industrial horticulture and agriculture. In the same ways that Mexican farmers are trying to protect corn and maize varieties. The word native is also tied up with the cultural history of the colonial times. I can see that. Who is to say what plant is native? I suppose the idea is to say where the cut off is. Or is it not worth categorising in that way. Do we stop trying to get rid of Rhododendron from the local hills as an ‘invasive’ (that word being more suspect really) species. I am thinking about a James Wong story about Rhubarb that I heard on gardeners question time. We all think that Rhubarb is a quintessential British fruit (rhubarb and custard and all that) but Rhubarb was originally from China or that area. The Romans used it as a medicinal plant and it was in the UK by 1390. It was the British that took this plant and turned it into something to eat as a dessert. It is true that like alot of other topics there is British exceptionalism in the underlying dialogue in gardening and we should check the language that we use. Like everything the British landscape gardens were influenced by south east asian gardens, Jekyll and Lutyens gardens brought in Arabic influences into the garden design…. we should take the world of plants as that wonderful cross fertilisation of ideas.
James Wrong… a wet-wipe offended by ‘Native’ plants and ‘heritage’.
Heritage = GMO… but in a bourgeois, positive sense
Some people like being mugs.
They know their place.
It’s sad that this exists. Who funds this nonsense?
I think James is totally wong on this one……
Colonialism usually is an attack to make people feel bad it’s often hijacked as stick to beat people with judgementally.
So cringe
Just complete nonsense..
‘Click bait’. Funny who are whinging about the title – one of the smallest things you can whine about when the conversation has so many layers to it! This is a channel 4 news channel on YouTube. What did you expect in terms of titles? It’s still a worthy conversation to listen to
Fascinating conversation, thanks for creating this… I am going to share this with my community garden.
https://youtu.be/-qMHNFOtjYk?t=79
Have you ever seen a Chinese scaffolder?
Sick of hearing racism this racism that it’s getting so people are to frightend to have an opinion.
dont like the heritage and native things, go somewhere else. why does he think that every other country outside of the UK is allowed to preserve and appreciate their heritage and native history, but not the uk? and what does he gain from this awful room temperature IQ take? also, why is he doing lectures? shouldn’t be anywhere near intelligent people.
It’s well known that Hitler was a liberal progressive until he started growing spinach on his window sill.
i can see many people criticising the title and i generally agree with disliking clickbait but i can honestly say i wouldn’t have clicked on the title if it was a boring title because my perception was gardening is really boring. now i’m really interested to find out more. thanks krishnan
As a child I followed my dad everywhere. We would run our horses through the woods trying to identify all of the branches that we hit, or hit us.I love you daddy.
Great way to sift commenters into those who troll and those who have engaged with the topic and have an experience based opinion.
Very interesting conversation! The title does not do it justice, it discusses a lot more issues than racism in gardening culture.
He should stick to gardening.
Now that Covid is on the wain and no Trump, C4, the BBC, Sky and a multitude of other networks are struggling to find anything that could be equally as contentious or headline grabbing and so this garbage is what you get.
Click bait title and a discussion that any sane person will know is absolute BS. What has happened to news in this country?!
Of course it is… everything is
Like access to swimming, I understand by gardening is racist…
I’ve learned from this deeply insightful interview that in the UK people have a fondness for things that are seen as part of its heritage. This is completely unique to the UK and is in no way a truism that could be said for every nation on earth.
The REAL racists are those that go LOOKING for racism in everything.
What a stupid click bait title.
Does snyone actually think that talking about tea, cheese and gardening as racist does anything but shut peoples ears to real issues?
No wonder very little to nothing has changed in a year being that we’re focused on cheese, tea and petunia.
Very interesting link: https://youtu.be/TlEuMJFDn0M
just one example what expertise, experimentation & limits can produce!
They took the naga morich from Bangladesh and renamed it Dorset naga 🙄 a chilli we have every day in British bangla homes they decided to rename it as Dorset, why?
Lol on noone asking his brother why he was into football.
Is James Wong ?
Hilarious to see all the Karens and Kevins who have been triggered by this fascinating discussion. It’s becoming increasingly clear who the _real_ ‘snowflakes’ are.
Once again Channel 4, and their chief race-baiter Krishnan, wasting everyone’s time.
The world is going totally crazy, something went in the water around the late 90s imo.
Somehow, I understood some change in tv gardening in recent past reflected a falling away of productive gardens: veg or flowers and market gardens in the UK. My impression was a wartime generation had carried over back garden horticulture as monoculture agriculture increased in the world. Then, the demographic shift of more people living in cities coupled with reduced access to land for allotments. For instance, where I lived in a capitol city, the housing project commissioned & built by local church endeavour was on slum land bombed in WW2 and had been allotment gardens ever since then, up until 90s.
Plants are racist now? C’mon guys, get a life!
This entire interview is a rank exercise in sophistry. In a typical mote and bailey, the hack moves back and forth between the incendiary claim that gardening is essentially racist (in its DNA) and that words like ‘heritage’ are racist, to the utterly banal claim that racism exists. He does this while simultaneously having the temerity to lecture others for apparently exaggerating things for clicks.
Are there not greater racist issues ? I refer to (shock horror i must have viewed to know)the porn industry .As a pot bellied 64 yr old White man I am disgusted at the way Afro types are portrayed as having some kind of abnormality and not as a rounded human I see this on both BBC and other channels I look forward to the day we can all be seen equal as God (pick your own for diversity ) intended
We get it, he’s a race grifter
The fact that gardening and plants have a colonial history does not make them ‘racist’. This is robbing ‘racist’ and ‘racism’ of any meaning whatsoever. Look up ‘racism’ in a dictionary: a) Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized; b) The belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another.
Anybody would ask why you got interested in botany, for heaven’s sake, get over yourself.
Of course gardens are racist, I’ve long suspected an antisemitism amongst my vegetable patch and my rhododendron are frankly white supremacist 🤷♀️
I hate gardens I don’t even like flowers!!!! And I feel great now because I find out the reason!!! Now, you don’t even need to have a black friend to say that you are not racist, you just have to hate plants and gardens and that proves that you are not racist!?!?!? God save me from this and I’m agnostic 99,9% of the time!!!
The liberal left is eating itself
James being pro GMOs and anti-native plants is hilarious. Yes guy is a 🤡 looking for attention wherever he can find it.