Gardens of life and death.

The herbarium of Hans Sloane in the Natural History Museum’s Department of Botany is a cunning object: a book of colonial nature that contains ethnographic artefacts in the guise of natural specimens. The eight volumes of Sloane’s specimens from his Jamaican voyage of 1687–1689 hold both dried plants and sample foodstuffs, many together with the original drawings prepared for the engravings of them published in the Natural History of Jamaica (1707–1725). These remarkable volumes have been re-bound over the years, but the plants, seeds and fruits remain essentially where they were when glued to the page over three hundred years ago. Visitorsmay examine heroic samples like Sloane’s Cacao : themost famous specimen in the herbarium, and both a lucrative commodity and a type specimen. But the majority, wrapped in their pre-Linnaean polynomials, are far more anonymous. Consider, for example, the Phaseolus maximus perennis, semine compresso, lato, nigris maculis notato and the Arachidna Indiae utriusque tetraphylla : varieties of kidney-bean and peanut. These bean and nut samples are highly significant, however. They are tangible evidence of how theAtlantic slave trade shaped themaking of natural history. Dutifully sourcing his specimens, Sloane noted that Phaseolus beans ‘are planted in most gardens, and provision plantations, where they last for many years ’ – ‘provision plantations’ being a synonym for plots of land cultivated by enslaved Africans.1TheArachidnae, meanwhile, were ‘brought fromGuinea in theNegroes ships,