Primary Materials

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores plants, seeds, soils, and other nonhuman actors as archival and architectural agents within the history of Lahore's urban landscape, as seen from the ground. It traces the halting efforts of the Agri-Horticultural Society of Punjab to enact regional improvement through the development of agricultural and botanical expertise at the advent of British colonial rule in the province, focusing on the materialization of this work in the society's gardens in Lahore. Foregrounding the contingencies of everyday garden making and maintenance, the article posits nonhuman ecologies as a materially diverse and ephemeral architecture and archive of landscape. It argues that, in helping assemble and modulate the society's efforts to model improvement, conduct plant testing, and develop an ornamental garden, plants, seeds, and soils become unlikely and sometimes unruly aesthetic and historical actors, furthering but also unsettling improvement discourse while relocating its historical effects from the region to the city, and providing new readings of the colonial urban landscape.