Racist Plants? London’s Kew Gardens Uses Plants To Highlight UK’s ‘Imperial Legacy’

Kew Gardens in London is to change labels on its plants and flowers in order to inform visitors on how racist they are, Daily Mail reported. 

The popular attraction, which welcomes over 2 million visitors a year from all over the world, is set to “change display boards for plants such as sugar cane – previously harvested by slaves – to highlight their ‘imperial legacy’”, reports the Daily Mail.

Tory MP Sir John Hayes responded to the announcement by saying he would look into public funding of Kew Gardens.

“This is preposterous posturing by people who are so out of touch with the sentiment of patriotic Britain,” said Hayes.

“This is typically bourgeois liberal arrogance which is ill-fitting of people that get public funding,” he added.

While it is true that Britain was heavily involved with the slave trade, they were also among the first major nations to abolish slavery.

In general, it’s bizarre to come to a garden to learn about plants and end-up being lectured about slavery.

The British initially became involved in the slave trade during the 16th century. By 1783, the triangular route that took British-made goods to Africa to buy slaves, transported the enslaved to the West Indies, and then brought slave-grown products such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton to Britain represented about 80 percent of Great Britain’s foreign income. British ships dominated the slave trade, supplying French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and British colonies, and in peak, years carried forty thousand enslaved men, women, and children across the Atlantic in the horrific conditions of the middle passage, as per historian Wilber Hague’s book William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner.

Historical figure William Wilberforce is largely credited with the movent to abolish slavery in the British Empire which began in the late 1700s and ended with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which abolished slavery in most of the British Empire. Wilberforce died just three days after hearing that the passage of the Act through Parliament was assured.