What stories do we tell about plants, and who tells them? Which stories are overlooked, and why? How do these narratives influence culture, identity, and community? These questions were at the heart of the recent workshop Plant Provocations led by researcher, educator, and gardener Tracy Qiu. Developed alongside the lightbox exhibition series Overseeding: Botany, Cultural Knowledge and Attribution, curated by Su-Ying Lee, this program invited participants to share knowledge about plants and people from a decolonizing and decentering perspective. Attendees were encouraged to bring their own plants of significance, with additional plants loaned by UTM’s Teaching Greenhouse. For Qiu, plants serve as an accessible tool for discussing decolonization, which she defines as “visibilizing, acknowledging, and intervening in past, present, and ongoing impacts of colonization.”

Qiu opened by recounting her childhood on a peanut farm in China, her immigration to Canada, and her unexpected career path—from a degree in animation to a pivot towards horticulture. She was only the second racialized person to enroll full-time at the Niagara Parks Commission School of Horticulture, one of the few programs of its kind in Canada, emphasizing the lack of racial diversity in the field.

Qiu explained how art and plant science have long been intertwined, from the frescoes and reliefs of Classical Antiquity in Europe and Southwest Asia to the gelatin silver photo prints of the Industrial Revolution. Despite advancements in photography, plant illustrations remained crucial for identification due to the variability of photographs under different lighting and weather conditions. Qiu highlighted different approaches to plant representation in Western European and non-Western cultures: Western depictions often isolate plant specimens on a white page, exemplified by Sorbus “Joseph Rock,” named after the Austrian-American botanist who collected plant specimens and seeds in Asia for 30 years in the early to mid-20th century. By contrast, non-Western representations typically show plants in relation to their environment, as seen in Métis artist Christi Belcourt’s painting The Wisdom of the Universe, about which Qiu highlighted its accurate representations and identifiable species.

Drawing inspiration from patricia kaersenhout’s Of Palimpsests & Erasure, which exposes how Dutch naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian exploited the physical labour and ethnobotanical knowledge of Indigenous and African people to produce her book, “The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname,” Qiu further explored the significance of other common plants including: