1. Evocative objects
“This is Karen Alexandra,” said M, holding a round ceramic pot with a specimen of Peperomia obtusifolia. The leaves were round and shiny, and M cleaned some dirt off one of their round plasticky leaves. “I usually name plants after the person who left them to me, to remember them,” she explained. Karen, the plant’s original owner, had been M’s business partner in a graphic design venture. She had inherited the plant from her mother after she passed in 2012. Karen migrated in 2014 and left the plant with M. A few years later, Karen’s sister also left and brought more of their mother’s plants for M to look after. They now lived here in this garden, with hundreds of other species she had received over the years, planted into the ground or in the ceramic pots that M, a ceramist, makes in her studio upstairs or hanging from walls or from the large trees cleaned of parasites and brought back to health after years of neglect.
A small glass table collected smaller and more delicate houseplants. As M named them, she referred the stories of Adriana, Anita, Bárbara, Chacho, Claudia, Helen, Humberto, Leo, and Veronica. A delicate fishbone cactus (Epiphyllum anguliger) whose long branches hung down belonged to a ceramist who returned to her natal Germany in 2016. Before leaving, she liquidated everything and gave M the plant. A lily (Eucharis grandiflora) with wide dark leaves was rescued from a friend’s apartment while she was stranded abroad during the pandemic; she never returned and the plant barely survived. A rare species of Phalaenopsis was left here by an architect now living in Qatar; she had been an orchid collector and many of her plants had died. A cactus (Echinopsis calochlora) had belonged to a high school friend who died in a climbing accident; his mother left it to M before leaving for Mexico. Its small, round, and prickly arms grew fast and M was constantly getting new plants out of it.
As she walked around, M pointed at a rare Musacea that belonged to a friend now living in Spain and a small coffee plant (Dieffenbachia camilla) that had been in her mother-in-law’s apartment for decades. “We used to go there to water it, she wanted it there for when she returned, but it was easier to bring it here,” M explains. A dracaena (Dracaena fragrans) stood in a plastic pot under a mango tree, dirty but thriving, roots breaking through the bottom to reach the soil. It was one of seventeen plants that once decorated the office of an opposition major who’d gone into exile during a period of political unrest. “Veronica kept going back to her boss’ office to water the plants until she found another job and brought them all here,” M continued. “I gave away the others and kept one.”
For M, these plants are more than a souvenir from a person who left. They are objects of care, immersed in pacts of trust that infuse mundane actions with symbolic meaning. They are also evocative objects1, a concept that refers to objects that not only accompany but also shape individual life trajectories, both collecting emotions and helping to organize thoughts. As such, for M, plants extend relationships severed by emigration and act as a means to keep in touch with distant friends.
They are also a reminder of a moment of separation and of her own circumstances at those times: what she was doing, where she was living, whether she was recently married or pregnant, a record of her own biography. At the same time, plants are a tool for making sense of the sweeping collapse that has forced millions of people to flee the country. “These plants connect me with emigration, with what happened to us. They are how I narrate the country’s situation in my own way, through my interests. Plants’ stories and of those who cared for them, of people who left but want to take a cutting, connect me to the tropic and its exuberance, to what our country has lived and lost,” M explains.
Another category of plants in the garden consists of those that M has found in nearby streets. A large Elkhorn fern (Platycerium bifurcatum) was salvaged from the dumpster after its habitat, one of the neighbourhood’s original houses, was converted to a car dealership and its garden was razed. M fixed it to a large mango tree, where it thrived. This collection of discarded plants with an altogether different biography turned the garden into a record of urban change, preserving the natural patrimony of the area as it rapidly changed.
2. The Garden
The house was in a former upper-class neighbourhood outside of the historic centre, built in the 1920s during a rush of oi-fueled urban expansion. Its curved streets, an adaptation of Raymond Unwin’s Garden Suburb, were lined with houses surrounded by greenery and covered by large trees. As the city engulfed the once-isolated suburb, many of its single-family homes were converted to fast-food restaurants or tire-repair shops, their original architecture barely visible under neon signs and ad hoc additions.
Now, after decades of economic crisis, most remaining houses stood dilapidated with the occasional “for sale” sign hanging out front. Some were still inhabited by the original residents, too old to migrate, or a caretaker who looked after the remains of prosperous lives. These ruined structures were sustained by remittances sent from abroad or by renting out parts of the house as apartments. Their precarious situation made them an easy target for voracious new elites, who bought large properties at bargain prices and turned them into restaurants, car dealerships or an emergent architectural typology known as the ‘narco-bunker.’
M's house belonged to a family who went into exile after their coffee business was expropriated by the government; they’d left two decades ago with nothing but a suitcase, waiting for things to cool down, and never returned. For years, they had someone come by to trim the plants that grew over the front wall and turn on the lights, strategies devised to detract human intruders. Meanwhile, nature took over inside: cats broke in through windows and tore the furniture, plants grew through cracks on walls and floors, an unfixed leak from the roof expanded to the walls, and mould grew in closets and bathrooms, initiating a process of decomposition that would eventually restore matter back to its organic origin. The unkempt garden, in the middle of the lot between the main house and an annexe in the back, adapted to rain and drought, growing lushly during the wet months and then drying over and decomposing, fertilizing itself. As it expanded, it erased the limits between itself and the architecture.
M’s husband knew the family and arranged to fix up the property in exchange for a place to live and work. They were aware that the owners’ financial needs would eventually defeat their emotional attachment to the left-behind house, forcing them to sell at a loss to finance a meagre retirement abroad. The couple moved in, shooed off the cats, fixed the leaks, and bleached away the mould, reversing decay and pausing cycles of decomposition. They restrained nature, raking dead leaves, pruning trees, reestablishing the limits between the garden and the house, and keeping the place together through daily tasks of maintenance and repair. They started receiving plants from friends and relatives who saw the garden as a safe place to leave them, at least temporarily. “Maybe people can come back one day, and I can return their plants, or I can invite them to my garden that is full of stories,” M said. Like the house and its garden, these plants’ existence was tied to the country’s fate: if things improved, their owners would return to pick them up; if, on the other hand, the situation destabilized further, they would settle abroad.
And so, the garden grew, an ecological refuge and a reservoir of collective memory. On Google Maps, the house became a dark green spot in a growing landscape of grey pixels. But the neighbourhood's transformation was an ominous anticipation of its own future. After the owners of the house lowered their asking price by more than half, potential buyers started to appear. One of them spoke of building a supermarket; another one needed a warehouse to store imported merchandise. “They are going to tear everything down, there will be nothing left,” said M, reflecting on the possibility of a sale. “I can’t leave these plants here to be chopped up.” Anticipating the sale, she outlined a scheme that could be rapidly activated: she classified plants, contacted recipients, planned transports and gave away cuttings, preventively disseminating the garden around the city. Until one day, in mid-August 2024, M received a call: the house had been sold.
3. Expulsion
In the early hours of Friday, August 30, 2024, a massive blackout left the country in the dark for most of that day. Power outages had become increasingly frequent in recent years, as corruption and lack of maintenance took a toll on an outdated and overused electrical system, but nationwide blackouts were rare. Amid the political upheaval of the last month, this blackout could mean anything. The best thing to do was to stay put. A few hours into the blackout, M received a text message: the buyer was on his way and wanted to start clearing the lot. Soon afterwards, a large crew stood by the gate, waiting to be let inside. Two large dump trucks came in first, followed by a third truck carrying a hydraulic excavator. A squad of workers walked in led by a man wielding a machete; they referred to him as ‘captain.’ Last came the buyer’s bodyguard in a large, shiny, black motorcycle, a gun visible to one side.
Without waiting for instructions, they cleared one side of the garden, driving the excavator into the bamboo forest that grew at the back of the property, ploughing through thicket and trees. The excavator’s shovel held entire plants in the air, where the men cut them into smaller pieces before the machine dumped the load into the trucks. They moved quickly, the excavator marking the pace of destruction. When both trucks were filled to the brim, there was a pause. One side of the garden was gone. The captain and the bodyguard came over to the space between the houses, where M and her husband were standing.
The men looked around as if assessing its size.
“We're coming here next,” said the captain, pointing at the garden.
“Give us a moment to move the plants,” M asked.
“Hurry up,” the bodyguard replied.
After that, everything happened very fast. M and her husband rushed to save whatever they could: they carried pots from one side to the other, piling them in a corner. There were pots of all shapes and sizes, which had accumulated over the years. In the rush, many toppled and broke. Plants were ripped from the ground and flown across the garden. M’s husband disappeared to the back and emerged carrying part of a giant Monstera, which he threw on the floor. M moved on to the sidewall, where climbing plants had taken hold. She ripped them from the wall’s surface, breaking them into smaller pieces by hand. Then she separated bromeliads and ferns from tree trunks with a small shovel. The pile of plants on the corner grew larger. What appeared to be an act of destruction was really a desperate attempt to save the garden from imminent obliteration. A friend came over and loaded everything he could onto a pickup truck. For all her anticipation and planning, nothing prepared M for this episode of violent expulsion. “For years, the owners have relied on us; now we are in the way,” she complained.
4. The Garden of the Meanwhile: A Fictional Ending.
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault employs the metaphor of the grid to visualize order as a system of relationships between independent entities related by their proximity. This metaphor allows him to approach botanical gardens, herbaria, and zoos - spaces that collect and organize nature - as three-dimensional extensions of the grid, where novel arrangements of natural species made possible “a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to the discourse.”2 As Foucault reminds us, what changed in the XVII century was not so much our curiosity about plants and animals but “the space in which it was possible to see them and from which it was possible to describe them.”3 In other words, modern taxonomy as a system of classification came after the spatial arrangements that placed things next to each other in new ways and not the other way around. What new relationships and categories emerge from M’s garden? What new worldview does its spatial arrangement allow?
The plants in M’s garden are a record of emigration and loss, of public offices vacated in haste, of the country’s failing institutions and disappearing middle class, and of the urban transformations that are rapidly erasing the city’s architectural and ecological patrimony. Its arrangement overrides scientific systems based on plants’ visible features, privileging memory over the senses. It creates categories based simultaneously on plants’ biographies and their lives beyond the garden. It is a taxonomy both of intimacy and of urgency, which organizes species based on their history of ownership and the places where they’ve lived as well as the possibility of saving them, possible destinations, and likely recipients: plants to sell or give away for free, plants for friends or for specialized collectors, plants to place in apartments or plants that will end up in a weekend house outside the city. Furthermore, the need to preserve stories gives meaning not only to the garden and to M’s labour as a gardener but also to her work as a ceramist: she manufactures portable substrates for propagating collective memory beyond the garden.
Reflecting on Foucault’s grid metaphor, new taxonomies allow us to reconsider how we think of collapse, be it economic or environmental, local or global. Collapse is not merely a shattering of order, a grid-less state in which things lose their place and relation to what surrounds them, but rather the imposition of a new system of relationships that overlaps and overrides previous ones, a moment of friction equally vulnerable to extinction and to possibility. The garden thrives in this interstitial space, the protracted meanwhile that exists between plants’ former lives and their future dispersal. In this space, M’s individual labour becomes part of a larger effort to preserve collective memory. Or, as she put it, “I don’t know if I will ever have my own garden or if people will come back. In the meantime, this moment during which plants tell my story and I tell theirs will have to suffice.”
References
1. Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.
2. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. 131.
3. Ibid, 131.