Kew Gardens Queer Nature: London’s iconic botanical garden celebrate plants and people

National World - LocalTV

Kew Gardens’ Queer Nature project will be live from September 30th. The project showcases all kinds of “different” plants and fungi, and connects nature to people by celebrating LGBTQ+ artists.

Transcript

00:00 Hello, I'm outside Temperate House in Kew Gardens, where this famous location in London

00:08 is putting on a project called Queer Nature, where they celebrate the similarities between

00:13 all kinds of plants and all kinds of people.

00:16 Yeah, good morning. So this is Queer Nature. It's a fantastic event where we're really

00:22 celebrating the incredible diversity of nature. So this is all about what Kew does best. It's

00:28 about plants and fungi that don't quite conform to traditional expectations. They challenge

00:34 our view of them a little bit. We've got some really stunning artworks. Behind me is the

00:39 Geoffrey Gibson piece, and it's all sort of inspired by Geoffrey Gibson's own personal

00:45 experience and how he wanted to bring nature into his own life to better it.

00:51 We've got the beautiful Queer Voices installation. So this is where we wanted to bring in other

00:57 voices. We don't want it just to be about Kew and what Kew thinks. So we've invited

01:02 a range of different people. And then we've got the beautiful garden installation, Breaking

01:07 the Binary. So that is by Patrick Featherstone. And Patrick worked in collaboration with Kew's

01:13 Youth Forum, which are an incredible group of 14 to 18-year-olds.

01:19 We were given the title Breaking the Binary. We did these really fun workshops with them,

01:24 where I taught them a bit about the history of taxonomy and how plants have been categorised

01:31 and the way they've been described in terms of gender and simple things, some of the ways

01:37 there are problems with that, room for improvement.

01:40 Historically, plants and people have been described together. So when Linnaeus created

01:46 the taxonomic system, he talks about the bride and groom. And there's some quite traditional

01:51 values that are going into the way that he's describing science. And that has sort of stuck

01:56 around in the way that we're taught about plants at school, giving and bestowing and

02:01 receiving and all of these things. And actually, it covers a very, very small proportion of

02:07 the plants that are out there in terms of how they reproduce.

02:11 I've learned a lot working with the forum. Well, there's more plant nerds like me. But

02:19 it's just so rewarding to work with young people, and then they can see the whole process.

02:26 I felt like we really listened to them when we were designing. And then they came in and

02:30 helped on the physical builds when we were quite far into the project. And they got their

02:34 hands dirty. And I think they've really seen their own ideas come to fruition, which is

02:39 lovely.

02:39 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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