Plant Infrastructure

This essay analyzes Miami as a place where plants are a major component of urban infrastructure. The centrality of tropical plants to the growth of Miami connects that city to the history of empire, where control of plant matter was the violent model for the standardization and distribution practices of modern infrastructure. In Miami, the US Department of Agriculture established a Plant Introduction Garden in 1898, with “Agricultural Explorer” David Fairchild activating networks connecting India, Kew Gardens, and Washington to bring mostly Asian tropical fruits, shrubs, and flowers to South Florida. A close reading of archives of botanical gardens, plant nurseries, and community organizations shows that Miami plant infrastructure was created jointly by these elite political/scientific networks and by vernacular, informal networks of Black labor migration and horticultural know-how. The essay focuses on the cultivation of Miami’s best-known plant product, the Haden mango, and the vital role in its propagation played by Black Bahamian gardener Nathan Sands, whose letters to his employer David Fairchild are preserved in the latter’s papers. Recovering the stories of people like Nathan Sands is vital to understanding the development of a global metropolis whose plant infrastructure erased the Black horticultural work on which it depended.