Guapamacátaro Art + Ecology residency, Michoacán, Mexico 2019
My research during the residency centred on eight plants growing on the site of the ex-hacienda Guapamacátaro. I investigated the plants’ movements into and out of Mexico, their histories, transformations and significances to the people there. Avocado, Maize, Tobacco, Water Hyacinth, Nopal, Datura, Rue and Amaranth.
Responding to the biographies of these plants, and the tacit knowledge imparted to me through conversation and workshops, I wrote a text, investigated their local ecological effects, gardened and learnt how to cook and prepare them.
To create an occasion to contemplate these plants with the community, I devised a menu using the edible plants, alongside ways to interact with the other plants, and invited them to share the table with these plants whilst I performed a reading of the text - to taste, to smell, to listen to them in the Guapamacátaro garden. Bringing unwanted and demonised plants and national treasures like Maize together over a table, intended to create a flattening of botanical hierarchies as well as prompting an unusual communal encounter between the people and the plants they share their space and history with.
My text is included below.
Ellos me llaman
Laura Plant
Avocado
Yo soy aguacate.
Persea Americana. Avocado, avogato, to advocate, I am avocat in France, or ‘lawyer’. Butter fruit in India, butter in Vietnam, cheese pear in Taiwan, palta from Quechua.
Avocado pear is corrupted to Alligator pear in England in the 1960’s, our first taste.
Aguacate, from the Nahuatl word āhuacatl, also used for ‘testicle’. Yo soy el oro verde de Mexico.
Glistening cadmium orbs. The tree is proud and robust in the Guapamacátaro garden, clusters of decked leaves protect the tree’s first fruits - freckled, and swollen with creamy flesh.
Avocado is everywhere in my country, and yet nowhere. It grows nowhere. The golfball seeds sit sedated on compost heaps. Flown in from Peru, from Ecuador - a long, problematic voyage. In brunches and supermarket salads, in nourishing skin balms and miracle hair treatments, the luminous innards have mythical celebrity status and an instagram following of their own.
But what of this plant, this botanical being?
Esta planta de la valle Tehuacan.
The oldest avocado pit fossil was found in Coxcatlan Cave, dating 10,000 years. They say the plant co-evolved with large, now-extinct megafauna who would swallow the pit whole and excrete it in their dung, ready to sprout. Now, it turns to humans, to tempt, to propagate, to cultivate. Martín Fernández de Enciso wrote the earliest known account of the avocado in Europe in 1519 and the plant was introduced to Spain in 1601. Green gold.
I hear they’re cutting down forests to feed the fad. to appease our appetite. In Michoacán, forest clearance for aguacate plantations is encouraged by municipal subsidies. 19,800 acres a year, they say. And the water… there is also the water… History repeats itself. A history of “planting and displanting”1 by global powers. And they were talking about “blood avocados”…
and talking of blood, they are good for it, avocado’s that is, good for the blood, that is. They have the capacity for healing; their flesh heals ours. This plant - globally transported, fought over and manipulated - with it’s rotund chrysalis and almond-leaf crowns, transforms us, too.
Maize
Quiero hablar de Maíz. But you know it better. It knows you better than I know you… or it.
The veins of Michoacán are thick with Masa.
“The leafy stalk of the plant produces pollen-inflorescences and separate ovuliferous inflorescences called ears that yield kernels or seeds.”2 The ears, then, let’s talk about the ears. Los orejas.
If we could listen to them speak, what would they say?
I see them in the fields. In neat rows, rows of corn - corn-row they call braided hair in South London and it makes sense. Doesn’t it? Tight woven lines like I see here. They assemble, flailing in the wind - in synchronicity yet each with individual flair. Like an out of practice troop of line dancers. A community of fledglings - their interior life awoken.
How must it be to grow (to be growing) baited with such expectancy? A landscape of hopeful yields.
“things of the sun’s warmth” they might call it. Or Corn-on-the-cob where I’m from.
Or sweetcorn, Maize, Mahiz in Taíno, Mealie in South Africa. It was ‘Indian corn’ to European colonisers - it’s centrality in Amerindian life, noticed, and then pushed aside.
The leaves like belts of rubber hang verdant against the cocoa soil.
And indeed, it all came from here. A greater weight of Maize is produced worldwide than any other grain and it all arose from a single domestication in the Balsas River valley of South-central Mexico, 9000 years ago. Maize is encoded with belonging in these soils.
But interventions close in, mutations ensue. Genetic modifications and seed patents threaten the thriving of corn (along with the thriving of bodies), much like the wheat of the conquistadors once did.
I read that the Aztecs equated Maize with human flesh, recognising the two substances as made of the same matter, at different points in the cycle. “I am the tender corn of jade” Lord Xipe Topec sang of his warrior flesh. They also characterised the visible earth as an unstable layer between stable and enduring heavens and underworlds, recognising the fragility and uncertainty of humans’ status in the cosmology. The matter of our bodies has been and will again become part of the vegetable cycle.
“You experience nature as ensouled, as sacred. Éste saber, this knowledge, urges you to cast una ofrenda of images and words across the page como granos de maíz, like kernels of corn.”3
The Mexican kinship with this plant is clear. Reciprocal co-dependence. Flora is transformed to fuel, through generations of plant feeding farmer, farmer tending plant - an intimacy of relation. A companionship between species, you might say…
But it knows you and you know it better than I.
Tobacco
Nicotiana.
Ancestral seeds germinated here when the grain era was uncovered. Disturbed. Eight plants have sprouted. They are like wavering memorials of another agriculture, another lifetime of this land. Like dormant ammunition, they push through the cracks, dissidents from vegetal generations past. Recuerdos de la tierra.
Nicotiana, or tobacco, tabaco. N. tabacum. The plant that ensnared the people.
Some cultivation sites in Mexico date back to 1000 BC, perhaps this was one. These weeds silently witness this history, giving nothing away.
Their adhesive leaves coat my fingers in a sappy layer on touch. The leggy stacks of leaves shuffle in the wind -practicing an awkward dance. Much taller than me, I crane my neck to see their crowns of pink flowers. I’m almost intimidated. I guess their stature befits their power. The disintegrating dry leaves smell like dusky pubs in England, mahogany wood and carpets ingrained with beer. And my father smoking cigarillos - I knew it was bad when he did it but I liked the coarse smell of undergrowth that lingered on his breath afterwards. And a plantation in the dry Viñales valley in Cuba where a leathery farmer rolled us a fresh cigar laced with honey. I bought a packet of 20 from him and never smoked them.
Spanish physician Nicholas Monardes popularised the medicinal use of tobacco in Europe, describing over 65 diseases he claimed it could cure. The plant "openeth all the pores and passages of the body" so that the natives “know not many grievous diseases, wherewithal we in England are often times afflicted”4 said Thomas Harriot on a 1585 expedition to Roanoke Island. Due to its alleged health properties, by 1700 Tobacco was a major industry of the European colonies.
Nicotiana seeds were first brought to Europe on orders from King Phillip II of Spain and planted in an area outside Toledo known as “Los Cigarrales” after the continuous plagues of cicadas or cigarras which had afflicted the town.
Tabaco, deriving from the Taíno language of the Caribbean, from Tobago meaning pipe. To the Maya of highland Chiapas, for whom it is a sacred, primordial medicine its is ‘helper’, it is ‘protector’. It is snuff, baccy, cigarette, cigarillo. It is Herba Nicotiana. It is fag, it is rollie.
And of course that is how I know it. This is how I coexist with this ancient, contentious plant. We meet in the bottom of a plastic pouch, tinged with guilt. Communing through inhalation, como la mayoría del mundo.
And perhaps it is true that this plant is not simply a victim of global economic exploitation. Perhaps it is more cunning than we know. Perhaps it exploits us. Capitalising on human desire for it’s intoxicating effects. We become hooked, we propagate and it spreads. It thrives. It pushes back through the cracks.
Water Hyacinth
Water Hyacinth. Jacinto acuático
It can double it’s mass in six days. Free-floating (free-loading) perennial aquatic weed.
It attaches itself to bodies of water in Mexico, clumping, a thick mat of camouflage. 40,000 hectares they say. Truly a beast of the shallows. Uno invasor
The crowds of emerald cups have the glossy sheen of plastic manufacture, a meadow of dewy funnels reflecting light at alternating angles. I find myself wanting to wade through and be amongst the spongy silicone pads. They are inviting. I like them, despite their reputation.
With origin in the Amazon basin, Eichhornia crassipes, has now occupied vast global territories. A huge, unmanageable problem in the Kerala backwaters in India, Lake Victoria in east Africa and Louisiana’s waterways as well as in Mexico. A myth goes it was introduced here by an asian woman, perhaps a mutation of the story of its introduction to the US as a gift from a Japanese group at the 1884 New Orleans World Fair.
The plant blocks sunlight and clogs water flow for neighbouring aquatic plants, sucks oxygen vital for fish and provides an ideal residence for mosquitoes. It is so successful due to it’s ability to clone itself in reproduction sending out runners to form daughter plants, with large patches sharing the same genetic form. Large piled islands of clones, strong enough to support a cow, so they say.
There is complexity here, though, they are regenerators too. They can give back. In Taiwan, Java and Vietnam they eat the carotene-rich leaves cooked, and in salads, and the roots have cleansing abilities: able to absorb harmful pollutants from the water they inhabit.
At Guapamacátaro they populate the streams and the vital veins of water, unbalancing the ecosystem. They co-exist with other plants here at the spring, but they control the territory it’s clear. A colony. We are stronger in numbers.
But how can we rethink the judgements of value in which one plant is attributed a weed and another a national treasure, according to their usefulness in a human-centred existence? How can we make space for demonised invasive plants and attend to their inherent purpose, beauty and belonging in this web of reciprocal plant-human relations? How might we, for example, make use of their persistent presence and their vigorous ability to thrive rather than fear it?
They may be here to stay…las malezas. Maybe even longer than us.
Nopal
Opuntia ficus-indica - this is not it’s name.
You know it as nopal, sabra, it’s fruit is tuna. It is ‘nopalitos’, It is ‘huevos con nopales’….Paddle cactus.
The genus, curiously named after the Greek city of Opus, where an edible plant grew and could be propagated by rooting its leaves. Appropriate in some ways I guess. No doubt coined by one of the ‘great European men’ who introduced this naming system.
The bigger bushes around here are a mass of hot greens: shades vary from lichen yellow to chlorophyll to dark pistachio to deep swamp. Their spines defend the inner territories of the plant, making little space for a hand or even a finger to enter. The realm of los mosquitos.
Nopal is indigenous only to the Americas. The plant soon became of interest as a valuable export of the Spanish empire and was introduced to Europe in the 1500s.
They called it prickly pear, cactus pear, barbary fig, Indian fig, spineless cactus. Cochineal.
Production of cochineal dye in Oaxaca, which had previously been cultivated since precolonial times by the Mixtec and Zapotec peoples, was so lucrative for the conquistadors that there are stories of French biopirates going undercover to extract specimens of the plant, attempting naturalisation in their territories to break the Spanish monopoly. Their cochineal plantation, however, failed.
Green dishes, puckered with spines like tent poles; they grow in assemblages stacked precariously on their ends. Their oval silhouettes look almost comical to me; caricaturing the ‘wild west’ movies they populate in my consciousness…
In Britain Nopal resides almost solely in the glass houses built as symbols of our wealth and power; Botanic gardens designed to house exotic and economic plants from global expeditions. The Princess of Wales conservatory at Kew Gardens in London exhibits an abundance of Opuntia species, confined to display, unable to survive otherwise in our soil - we are spectators of their strangeness.
But here it is regal, it is wild. It is el Escudo Nacional. It is the Aztec prophecy of Tenochtitlan.
At Guapamacátaro, four nopal spires grow from the pillars of the old barn. Monolithic sentinels. I suppose they were germinated from bird droppings containing seeds. It proves they really can grow anywhere.
It is La planta de vida: it’s fallen leaves grow roots wherever they touch soil and form new plants. It is so efficient in converting water to biomass in arid land, they call it the ‘crop of the future’. With increasing global droughts and farming environments drastically altered due to climate change, nopal can and will, save lives.
Datura
Planta datura - the sorcerer of Guapamacátaro, menace of the garden.
I can see 18 sizeable young plants from where I sit. More will come later this month when the ground is activated by the rains. It is not going away.
The new growths are gently nudged by the wind. Their serrated leaves are speckled like shoes after painting a ceiling with white emulsion. Little sharp tongues in dark teal. A youthful spurt.
Datura Stramonium. Datura from sanskrit, meaning ‘white thorn apple’ ; stramonium from greek meaning “nightshade” and mad”.
Ellos me llaman Toloache. Jimsonweed, Jamestown Weed, Thorny Apple of Peru, moon flower, devils trumpet, devils weed, devil’s cucumber, stinkweed, locoweed, prickly burr, devils snare. This name tugs at a memory for me. In Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, JK Rowling used the name ‘devils snare’ to describe a plant with thick dark tendrils that ensnares wizards, wrapping and then strangling them.
The hallucinogenic Datura produces intense visions that can last several days and sometimes cause amnesia. Unpredictable levels of toxicity depend on the age, the conditions of the soil, environment and local weather conditions. It has been widely used in traditional medicine; the ancient inhabitants of Southern California, for example, would ingest it’s small black seeds to commune with their deities and in European witchcraft, nightshades were a key ingredient for making “flying ointment”. The name “Jamestown weed” originates from a story of a group of English soldiers who, whilst attempting to suppress “Bacon’s rebellion” in Jamestown, Virginia in 1676, gathered leaves of Datura for a salad and, after eating, spent eleven days in altered mental states. Inner and outer landscapes collapse.
“We wonder why plants so different botanically should converge, so to speak, on such similar [intoxicating] compounds, and what role such compounds play in the plant’s life - are they mere byproducts of metabolism; are they used to deter or poison predators; or do they play some essential role in the plants themselves?”5 says Oliver Sacks.
Early colonisers of Central America, where the plant has likely origin, collect the datura for it’s unique properties. John Gerard writes about 'Thornapple' as a widespread cure when boiled with hog’s grease in his herbal in 1587 and James Anderson of the East India Company disseminates knowledge of datura’s power in Europe in the 18th century. Now it aggressively grows in temperate regions worldwide, on roadsides, rubbish dumps and dung-rich land.
It is foul-smelling, apparently. Its leaves taste bitter and nauseating, they say. It has long, angelic, trumpet-like flowers. Its thorny seed capsule, divides into four when mature: an ominous mouth. The seeds, if spilt, are carried by birds and spread, able to lie dormant underground, then resurrect. Jimsonweed is successful, that’s for sure.
Assembling as a regiment, or more like a slow-motion zombie attack, the plants emerge surely from the depths of the soil, they are rallying, it’s tangible. I feel like if I sat here for long enough they might start inching towards me.
Ruda
Ruda, or “tough one”
An ancient herb from the Balkans.
A powdery blue shrub with a hazy aura, it’s features blurring with distance. Its odour is powerful, but not unpleasant… I think. You can smell its potency. It’s almost citrus but with a grassy edge, with something honey-sweet, cinnamon even. Or maybe it’s lemongrass - it’s sharper when the leaves are compressed - or it could be pine. But it’s not like anything else really… the leaf fronds, anyway, are pleasing: spongey; paddle-shaped; tongue-like.
Coveted by the Romans for medicine, drunk in grappa by the Croatians, eaten by the Ethiopians, sung about in folk songs by the Lithuanians. It is disliked by cats (and supposedly snakes, in India) because they are repelled by its strong smell. It is heavily cloaked in mythology, worldwide. Entangling with it’s medicinal uses, ruda wields it’s magic, enfolded with lore and herbalism.
The Basilisk’s breath, it is said, which wilts plants and cracks stones, has no effect on the tough one ruda.
At one time, the catholic church used a branch of ruda to sprinkle the holy water on followers. They called it the herb-of-grace after this.
Herbygrass, Ruta, Rue (reuo) - to set free.
It’s pungent smell and the bitter taste of it’s leaves drew associations with the unrelated verb ‘rue’, to regret. A lamentar.
"Here did she fall a tear, here in this place
I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace”6 said the Gardener in Shakepeare’s Richard III
Ruda comes to Mexico with the Spanish priests who use it in catholic mass; the branch-cleansing practice is adopted by curanderas. Grown to roll up and stuff in your ears for altitude sickness now, grown for a tea to aid menstruation, grown to the distaste of insects, grown to help, to cure - a healing ally.
Perhaps that smell is vanilla, or grape… no. That’s not it either.
It is so still here in the garden, lamenting, like a wise sage.
Amaranth
Yo soy Amaranto.
Amarathus cruentus. Amaranth, Huāuhtl. I am rajgira, meaning ‘king seed’ in India, I am Pigweed. I am ”not worth an amaranth”
Amaranth, deriving from the Greek words amárantos meaning ‘unfading’ and ánthos meaning ‘flower’.
I cannot find it here. I have been looking everywhere for its distinctive fluffy tendrils, but it grows nowhere nearby. When seeds were planted here in the Guapamacátaro garden they couldn’t be coaxed into life. They lie dormant in the undergrowth still.
Yet this was once a staple grain of this land. It is thought to have represented 80% of pre-hispanic energy consumption. Fading into obscurity with the arrival of the conquistadors, interest in Amaranto was revived in the 1970’s and the crop was recovered from wild varieties.
In the Oaxaca region community agriculture groups are now working with subsistence farmers to further develop the cultivation of Amaranto, in order to tackle malnutrition and poverty in the area.
In pictures I see big elaborate bouquets of fingers in that rusty hue, tenderly cradled by its leaves. It has a cuteness to it, it looks touchable. The catkin-like cymes of densely packed flowers sag under the weight of their bounty - the seed. The large seed-heads can contain half a million of them, I read.
Alegría. I am joy, I am happiness. I am ”noble plant”.
Cultivation is outlawed by the Spanish, considered brujería. Recoiling at it’s use in ritual: mixed with honey and blood as an offering to the gods and then eaten; used to make symbolic objects to celebrate the birth of a new child. Enfolded with fear, its flourishing is halted.
But they collected it still for the European hothouses, prized as an ornamental plant. Brought to Africa, the Caribbean by English merchants. Its weedy growth culture allowing it to bloom in many parts of the world since.
Its nutrition-rich leaves are eaten in many rural areas due to the ease of cultivation. In Greece its a dish called vleeta, boiled then mixed with olive oil and lemon. In Malaysia it is bayam, In north India it is chaulai, in south India it is cheera. In Uganda it is know as doodo. In the Yoruba language it is called shokoyokoto (meaning ‘make the husband fat’) or arowo jeja (meaning ‘we have money left over for fish’). In Jamaica it is callaloo. It is Callaloo! I do know this plant! I’ve eaten it in many plump turmeric patties in Brixton. We have met before - a convergence of trade routes, mapping amaranth’s trajectory across continents.
And still, I hope it sprouts soon: the hummingbird’s flower. I hope those subterranean seeds bring the popped grains for alegría to the garden.
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1. Botanical Decolonization: rethinking native plants, Mastnak, T. Elyachar, J. Boellstorff, T., Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 32, 2014
3. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, ‘now let us shift…the path of conocimiento…inner work, public acts’ This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, 2002
4. Thomas Harriott, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, 1590
5. Oliver Sacks, Oaxaca Journal, 2002
6. William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act III Scene iv, 1595
With thanks to Alicia Marván, DIana Bustos and all residents of the Guapamacátaro village for the conversations that informed this text.