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Reworking Biopower as Florapower
In this analysis, the author reviews the origins and operations of a major American establishment for the botanical sciences: the Missouri Botanical Garden. In recounting how the Garden was founded and why it survives today, the author suggests that botanical gardens are another one of the many social institutions used to generate knowledge in modern society, thereby articulating power. It is widely believed that modern men and women need scientific knowledge about plants to preserve and enrich life. Institutions like the United Kingdom's Royal Botanical Garden at Kew or its North American imitator the Missouri Botanical Garden, help create such knowledge. They express power by displaying bounded images of nature and by creating models of how humanity might coexist aesthetically and economically with certain plants in particular sites to produce the benefits of modern life. Thus, in addition to creating particular kinds of scientific information and providing entertainment, botanical gardens play a role in shaping contemporary political culture.
The Missouri Botanical Garden sits amidst the southside of St. Louis, strikingly incongruous in the rough neighborhoods that now surround it. Sitting not far from old sprawling railway yards, decrepit industrial factories, and rundown inner-city houses, where everything troubling about America's urban decay jumbles together cheek by jowl with crime and chaos, the garden is a tiny oasis of Victorian order penned up behind limestone walls and chain-link fences. Still, along with the world famous St. Louis Arch over the Museum of the Western Expansion, the Missouri Botanical Garden is one of the city's most recognizable icons. For example, in an April 1999 story, The New York Times dropped a bright color shot of yellow tulip beds in front of the garden's Ridgway Center entry doors as a "sign of Spring" in its efforts to cast St. Louis as an attractive destination for bored Manhattanites (Apple, 1999, p. B29).
Few photos of the garden, however, disclose the beleaguered position of its grounds. When Henry Shaw began his botanical garden in the 1850s, the site was a treeless prairie far removed from the city of St. Louis. After Shaw died in 1889, St. Louis continued to prosper, but it was still quite a distance to downtown. The city's strategic position along the...