Some of the first things Captain Cook and the botanist Joseph Banks extracted from Australia and New Zealand were seeds. Banks was travelling around the world aboard the Endeavour, plucking these different seeds and plants from all over. The reverse also took place. We see English trees and flowers around us all the time in Australia and New Zealand, and sometimes mistake them for local things, because they are so embedded in our environments.
Last year, we spoke to the Australian artist Gabriella Hirst on the Kei te pai press podcast about her projects An English Garden (2021) and ‘How to Make a Bomb’ (2015–ongoing), which consider the British Imperial histories of ‘gardening the world’ and their ongoing nuclear armament programmes, including the tests carried out on unceded first nations land in Maralinga, the Montebello Islands and Emu Field, all in Australia. Hirst, who maintains a gardening practice, was researching the historical entanglement of gardening and military violence when she came across Rosa floribunda ‘Atom Bomb’, a rose created in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War. Her work considers the ongoing legacy of nuclear military violence and the role of imperialism embedded into the soils of countries all over the world. The following is a condensed version of our original conversation.
I’m Gabriella Hirst. I’m an artist. I was born on Cammeraygal land and I am currently based in Berlin. For the last eight years, in heaps and troughs, rising and falling, I’ve kept a gardening practice that has informed my research and my thoughts around what it is to make art, what it is to make art in a Western context, and what I am as a maker and as a gardener.
In my work, and An English Garden in particular, naming is so important, language is so important. The process of taking these plants, these seedlings, from places that were not England, extracting them and bringing them into greenhouses, and replacing their names and the meanings that they had from the places they came from, I was thinking about that. These are not exclusively English things, but they’re wrapped up in this question of what an English garden is.
To call the project An English Garden … that title is a big question. What does it mean to do ‘English’ gardening on a global scale or a microscale? What does gardening mean? What has ‘English’ gardening meant in the past, and what does it mean going into the future with all these imperial legacies? I had been thinking of control, this relationship between care and control; and specifically of the rose garden as a place where these practices have been played out and can be tested. I started researching the idea of the rose as a national symbol of Britain, but this plant is very much a European plant, and can be a way to talk about English gardening in the bigger sense.
Roses have so much religious significance and also so much political weight. They have been used as a symbol of the left, in the Bread and Roses movement; but also, because of their association with totalising love, they’ve been used in propaganda imagery for far-right dictators—they are always being handed a bunch of roses, you know? They are never handed a bunch of lilies or palm fronds. It’s always red roses, too.
The rose has a long history of a relationship with conquest. Rose gardens are always grown around the outsides of powerful buildings around the British empire—in Nigeria, in India, in the Old Parliament House Gardens in Kanberri Canberra. These plants furnish places of colonial power. Other plants have their own story of displacement; for instance, jacarandas. I love how in November on Gadigal Country Sydney, everything is purple, but how did they get here? There were groups in Australia, New Zealand and Canada that were set up (the artist James Nguyen told me about this originally) to bring flora and fauna from Europe, from the UK, to the new colonies. It was very much about a desire to make their surroundings look like European gardens, which comes from a lot of things, like fear and misunderstanding, but also from not seeing that the places were already gardened before these settlers arrived. But now all these plants and animals are still here. How do we navigate these plants? The movement of plants around the world is not exclusively attached to the British colonial project. It’s messier than that, it’s got a longer history than that. With plants, we have to sit in a complicated dissonance, and I find gardening is a really good place to work through that and your own complicity, because it gives you time. Rather than scrutinising the plants, it becomes a way of scrutinising ourselves.
I was originally collecting plants that had been named after battles. Plants have Linnaean names, and alongside those they have their cultivar names; so, for instance, Rosaceae is the plantgenus name, but within this group there is a specific rose named ‘Battle of Britain’ by the hybridiser who bred it. I was collecting all of these plants and growing them in this communal garden in Germany. In the course of this research, I found a particular rose called Rosa floribunda ‘Atom Bomb’ that was created in 1953. So this project came from finding and working with one of these plants, and propagating it became a way of thinking about roses. I was curious about this plant with this really horrendous name that evoked such violent histories. At that time, I was very naive; I knew that there was still nuclear armament, but I didn’t know then about how much of an impact it still has on the world. I saw this plant as a historical relic of this time, the 1950s, and I was curious about what it would mean to tend to something that was so violent, to have to care for that plant.
So I tried to find one. It’s only kept now in something like four rose collections, not nurseries. Nobody sells these. Three of them are in the former USSR, in ex- Soviet Bloc countries, and one is in the Fineschi rosarium, a rose archive in Italy. So I talked to them and told them about my research, and I asked if they could send me one. They only had one, but said they could graft it for me, and send it in two years for forty euros. When I got an email two years later, I had to fly back to Germany, where I’d been living, because for them to send it to the UK was really difficult. I flew back to the UK from Germany, and I remember having it in my hand luggage as a bare root, or a dormant plant. Being from Australia, I was really nervous about bringing a plant across international borders, so, from the start, it felt like a weird object to be dealing with. A living object, laden with this name that has so much meaning. It was such an active thing to be working with.
I started to really dig into what the current British and global nuclear weapons situation was while I was doing a residency at this place called Cove Park in Scotland, only one bus-stop away from Faslane, which is where nearly the entire nuclear arsenal of the UK is kept. I knew, growing up, about the tests at Maralinga, and had a poster of the Rainbow Warrior in the living room. I had that book, When the Wind Blows. It’s a graphic novel about an elderly couple dealing with the fallout from a nuclear attack, using this little government-supplied advice pamphlet. They keep trusting that everything is going to be okay. Obviously, in the case of something like this, the government has failed the people. That book was such a significant piece of art to think about the failure of the state, but also the sadness of that. Growing up, all these things seemed like ‘crimes of the past’. But what happened at Maralinga (South Australia), Emu Field (South Australia) and the Montebello Islands (Western Australia) is still happening. The community inherited this—armed-service people, but it predominantly continues to affect First Nations people whose land that is. The weapons tested by Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s re-established Britain’s position as a global power after it lost so many territories after the Second World War. They did that through another act of (and I use this phrase with a lot of bitterness in my mouth) imperial gardening, by deciding that these were places in a part of the world that, in their eyes, could be strewn with nuclear fallout and plutonium. Looking at the ‘Atom Bomb’ rose, I became so aware of how those histories never ended.
Despite all this talk of gardening, I’m actually a terrible gardener. So I went to David Austin Roses, which is this old and quite stuffy, very established, British rose nursery. They are famed for being the best in rose breeding, and all their roses are called, like, ‘William’ and ‘Catherine’—it sounds like a UKIP campaign—but they were very generous and taught me how to graft. Then I started grafting the roses, and that’s where the idea of ‘How to Make a Bomb’ emerged. We made a publication, an informative pamphlet that teaches you how to graft, but it also has writing on these nuclear and colonial histories of Britain and its current nuclear arsenal. The idea of the project is to propagate more of these plants, to assimilate them into the world, specifically into English gardens and English soils, with this pamphlet, so that they can be tended to by individuals as a way of tending to these histories, particularly the violence of that history. It could also be an active tool thrown back to disrupt the English garden: if people wanted to graft their own roses they could then go and plant them in specific gardens … at Number Ten Downing Street, or maybe Kew Gardens as this storehouse of ‘botanical empire’, or outside the Tate, with its colonial history. Planting an ‘Atom Bomb’ outside the Houses of Parliament is potentially contentious, as is talking about nuclear colonialism, and colonialism full stop, in the UK. But it’s a rose. At the end of the day, what could be more benign and what could be more English than a rose?
Eventually, I did an installation of these plants as part of the Estuary Festival in Essex, a hexagonal garden bed with the ‘Atom Bomb’ roses we had propagated, laid out in a very regimented way. It was called An English Garden. It’s all very pretty and polite on the outside, but there is so much power hidden beneath that polite Englishness. The hexagonal shape of the bed referenced architectural ground plans of a former military base, just a few kilometres from the site where it was installed. Foulness Island is where early British nuclear weapons, including the ones sent to the Montebello Islands, were assembled, then sent off on a ship from the pier that’s in Gunners Park, a two-minute walk from the installation.
The garden beds were accompanied by typical garden benches, with bronze plaques. Two of the plaques had drawings, and the other one had a text listing the names of these plants and information about the significance of this site, about how it was very close to the site where the weapons were developed, and about where they were detonated on unceded Aboriginal land. It also highlighted that Britain’s current government had vowed to increase its nuclear arsenal by forty percent. It said, “In doing this, a decision has been made to direct considerable resources towards industries of violence instead of those of care,” and that it was a continuation of Britain being a nuclear–colonial state. Quite heavy wording for a rose garden, but all of which is true and should be common knowledge. It should be common knowledge that Britain tested nuclear weapons on Indigenous land in Australia. It’s no small historical fact. It’s no small thing to detonate twelve atomic weapons in another country. If you are going to have those weapons then be honest about how they came about. It should not be contentious to put that into public space, that the British nuclear arsenal is currently in a huge act of expansion. ground plans from Foulness Island, which is where early British nuclear weapons, including the ones sent to the Montebello Islands, were assembled, then sent off on a ship from the pier that’s in Gunners Park, a two-minute walk from the installation.
An English Garden was up for five weeks and there were zero complaints. Then two individuals in the local council, which is a Tory council, took issue with the wording on that plaque and emailed the commissioning body of the festival saying that it needed to come down by that afternoon or they would bring about a national press campaign. They had a problem with the critique of the British establishment, and said that Britain was under-armed if anything—and that we ‘were’ colonial and we ‘are’ nuclear. The commissioning body were concerned about the wellbeing of their community, and they just felt like the right-wing press in the UK, the damage that it can do and the violence that it can incite, was something that they couldn’t deal with on such short notice. We couldn’t just take down the sign, because then it wouldn’t be the work anymore, so we had to take down the garden. It’s now an empty rose bed.
When it came down, a lot of the conversation was about how that fitted into the taking down of monuments, and what that means. And that kind of revealed what we already know, that these UKIP blokes aren’t about freedom of speech; they’re about preserving certain narratives over others. It’s not that they want things to stay up for there to be discussion.
If anything, it shows how having weaponry creates a space for fear. Most of the time, those weapons function on a psychological level. It’s the knowledge that they could be detonated. Which is one of the reasons why I thought having a rose to talk about these things, in a time of extreme nuclear rhetoric, is useful—working with plants is a way of slowing down, considering, just dealing with what’s in front of you.
I wondered whether the person who created the ‘Atom Bomb’ rose, Reimer Kordes—instead of it being a marketing thing for a time when there was a lot of excitement about nuclear futures within Western markets, think of the bikini swimsuit being named after Bikini Atoll— was making this plant as something you could tend to and prune, your own little atom bomb, a way of dealing with that fear and controlling this vast and totally terrifying idea of a nuclear winter that is totally unfathomable in human timescales. The rose becomes an antidote to that fear.
Thousands of Flowers: an interview with Minister Paul Goldsmith