Why this project?

Image: the St Vincent and Grenadines Botanical Garden taken by Welch, 2023

In 2020 I was in St Vincent and the Grenadines with a colleague Prof Niall Finneran, to speak to the Garifuna Heritage Foundation that year about Garifuna community heritage. In researching for the event I came across the archive of Alexander Anderson, the superintendent of the St Vincent Botanical Garden from 1785 to 1811. The archives were at The Linnean Society in London, and whilst there casually mentioned to the archivist, Dr Isabelle Charmantier, that should any funding be available, maybe we could look to get a project done on the manuscripts.... the rest is history.

In 2021 I applied for a seed fund grant to develop a larger project around the Anderson archivists, and in 2022 we got the larger grant too. This large grant was to transcribe the manuscripts and develop an educational pop-up exhibition for the St Vincent Botanical Garden.

The project involved working with the St Vincent Botanical Garden to ensure the exhibition met their needs, and with the Linnean Society who hold the Anderson manuscripts; the Natural History Museum in London who hold dried-and-pressed plant specimens that Anderson send from the Caribbean to London; the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew to help with the plant names (plant nomenclature) and associated data; the Museum Detox Interpretation Group in London to help us think through developing an exhibition that was focussed around issues associated colonialism and enslavement; and the Antonio Carluccio Foundation who supported the project through Prof Finneran's expertise.

Even though the project finished, my connection with the botanical garden continued, and in discussions with Rodica Simmons-Tannis, the director of the National Parks Authority which runs the garden, it became clear that the garden needed a guidebook. This guidebook would do several things, it would provide an accessible and engaging resource that tourists visiting the garden could buy as a memento and maybe even a present for friends and relatives (so possibly helping to increase tourism to the country), and it would provide a resource for locals, few of whom know much about the history of the garden. However, because of the garden opened in 1765, this guidebook would include information about the history of the country and thus tie the garden more closely to the people and plants of the region.

The project is supported by the current directors of the garden, and the Prime Minister Dr Hon Gonsalves, has agreed to write a foreword to the guidebook. I really hope people can get on board with the fundraising and in the garden's 260th anniversary year, help fund this project and get for the first time ever, a guidebook for the oldest botanical garden in the Western hemisphere.