Margaret Konkol

On February 8, 1912, Canadian activist Gertrude Harding orchestrated a protest in the form of a midnight destruction of rare orchids in Kew Gardens. Since the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew operated as a central node in Britain’s colonial network, a “depot for the interchange of plants wherever it saw commercial possibilities,” Harding’s targeted liberation of colonial subjects struck at the deceptively ornamental center of English power. Acting in the name of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Harding delivered a message: cultivated orchids would no longer be complicit in England’s botanic imperial schemes. A year later, in March 1913, in another attack on public parks, the WSPU arson campaign led to the setting fire of the Heaton Park pavilion and bowling house. Christabel Pankhurst called this destruction a work of “purification,” explaining the acts as part of a “great upheaval, a great revolution, a great blasting away of ugly things . . . to make way for the good and the new.” From these instances it is evident that the WSPU recognized the pliability of nature for political purposes. In 1913, members of the WSPU etched with acid the phrases “Votes for Women” and “Deeds not Words” into the grass at Sandwich golf course. The exclusionary, curated green space––a golf club reserved for men and known to be a favorite of liberal party suffrage opponents––had been the target of feminist admonishment. A newspaper report of a WSPU rally notes that “a barbed wire had been strung along the front of the platform and it was hidden by decorations and flowers. Several policemen were hurt when they grabbed the concealed wire.” The Chicago Tribune’s report on the cross-Atlantic activity claimed in a mix of horror and glee that suffragettes had “hurl[ed] flower pots at police” (1). By destroying curated nature spaces like the female-prohibited golf course or the imperial zoological garden, suffragettes challenged the sacredness of taboos organized along lines of gender exclusion and disrupted horticultural activities used in service of exploiting colonial farmland. At their most literal, they weaponized their floral decorations.

In the opening days of 2020 modernists may have rejoiced over two significant events. On January 1, works published in 1924 entered the public domain. On January 2, Princeton University opened to the public the recently uncrated 1,131 letters from T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale. In these two opposing examples of the modernist archive 2020 stages a central tension between diffusion and enclosure, between the dream of a universal library—which paradoxically and simultaneously enacts a “library without...