BACK TO TOP
(1) Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press. 2008.
(2) Gordon, 17
(3) Middelmann, Maryke. Proteas: The Birth of a Worldwide Industry. Xlibris, 2012.
(4) Coetzee, J.M; Littlejohn, G.M. “Protea: A Floricultural Crop from the Cape Floristic Kingdom”. Horticultural Reviews, vol. 26, 2001, pp. 77-112.
(5) ibid.
(6) Middelmann, Maryke. Proteas: The Birth of a Worldwide Industry. Xlibris, 2012.
(7) Fraser & Fraser. The Smallest Kingdom: Plants and Plant Collectors at the Cape of Good Hope, Royal Botanic Gardens, 2011.
(8) Boehi, Melanie. “Radical Stories in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden: Emergent Ecologies’ Challenges to Colonial Narratives and Western Epistemologies.” Environmental Humanities, vol.13, no.1, May 2021, pp. 66-92.
(9) Parvin, P.E. “Proteas – from ‘curiosity’ to ‘commodity’”, Veld & Flora, vol.70, no.4, December 1984, pp.109-111.
(10) Brockway, Lucile. “Science and Colonial Expansion: the Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens.” American Ethnologist: Interdisciplinary Anthropology, vol. 6, no. 3, August 1979, pp.449-465.
(11) Subramaniam, Banu. Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism, University of Washington Press, 2024.
(12) Schiebinger, Londa; Swan, Claudia. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce and Politics in the early Modern World. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
(13) Haraway, Donna. The Haraway Reader. Routledge, 2004.
(14) Pekal, Amy. “Assembling the Natureculture Garden: A Diffractive Ethnography of the Utrecht Oude Hortus”, Utrecht University, 2020.
(15) Stoler, Ann. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, Issue 2, 2008, pp. 191–219.
(16) Stoler, Ann. Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Duke University Press, 2016.
(17) Johnson, Nuala C. “Botanical Gardens and Zoos” from The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge. SAGE Publications. 2011, pp. 99-110.
(18) Peeren, Esther. Attending to Ghosts: Cultural Analysis, Close Reading and the Cultural Imagination. Faculty of the Humanities, Inaugural lecture, no. 611. 27 September 2019. University of Amsterdam.
(19) Gordon
Proteaceae Spectral: The Naturalcultural Haunting of Colonialism
Evie Evans
Whereas in the nineteenth century, plants, animals, and people from tropical regions were displayed in botanical gardens – imperialistic gestures intended to communicate the ruler’s global ambitions at home – today we can have objects from the tropics delivered to our door.
Susanne Figner, Flamingo Flowers
To speak of colonial ruination is to trace the fragile and durable substance of signs, the visible and visceral senses in which the effects of empire are reactivated and remain.
Ann Stoler, Imperial Debris
Haunting is an encounter in which you touch the ghost, or the ghostly matter of things: The ambiguities, the complexities of power and personhood, the violence, and the hope, the looming and receding actualities, the shadows of our selves and society.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters
Can we be haunted by flowers? Can a flower be a ghost? These were the first questions that came to mind when looking at Jabulani Dhlamini's Protean Routes photography. His photographs in the Netherlands strike a sense of frigidity. Their atmosphere is cold: cold metal frames, boxes of flowers piled and placed high. In the few images of people, they work alone, navigating the dark warehouses, sitting in sterile offices in the desolate early hours.
In contrast to the expected idea of a flower market—the noise and bustle of the industry—Dhlamini chooses to capture the Dutch side with a deep unease. Even in photos with multiple people, they appear solitary—figures standing alone, time and distance between them. Otherwise, they are together as phantom reflections in windows, blurred smudges in the warehouses amongst metal carts. Dhlamini does the expert task of drawing our attention to the actual subject, which is both present and absent: the King Protea.
Packed tightly in boxes, tipped over or the centre of a crime scene of flower heads and water, like an explosion on the ground, the protea flowers are never centre stage – pressed in between other flora – and yet, as Avery Gordon argues of ghosts in the cultural imagination, they demand attention. Do you consider the origin of your Mother’s Day bouquet? Or the complex web of commerce, history, and people that make your local bloemenkiosk possible? Through the empty carts and empty rooms that Dhlamini captures, the protea is a sort of ghost, “a sign telling you a haunting is taking place”.1 I take cues from sociologist Avery Gordon and cultural analyst Esther Peeren, who, in turn, are inspired by Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. They both refer to realms of figures or artistic objects, but how does the relationship between ghosts and haunting change when the ghost is alive as a plant?
Fig.2 Jabulani DhlaminiEmpty trollies after auction Aalsmeer, North Holland
The protea is already a “real” ghost because it is a product of material effects,2 as shown through the photographs of Jabulani Dhlamini and Jansen van Staden. Entire swaths of land have been worked and reserved for protea cultivation, people’s livelihoods, and global logistics defined by a single type of flower. Yet, it has shifted from a living being into an object, something to be owned, studied, and sold. The Proteaceae plant occurs naturally in South Africa, its first written reference dating back to 16053, descriptions of which were first published in the Netherlands in 17374. In 1753, Carl Linnaeus featured his taxonomy of the Protea, dubbing the plant after the Greek God Protea5 – a confusion between two variations of the same species and its resemblance to the artichoke. Not as insightful as one might expect. In the 1770s, Francis Masson, the botanical collector for the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, sent the first seeds of the plant abroad, and by 1774, the first flower successfully grown outside of South Africa was shown at Kew. In 1809, Joseph Knight published his book On the Order of the Plants, which belongs to the natural order of the Proteeae in their cultivation. By the 1830s, protea flowers were the new horticultural trend for the English upper class6 7 – its commercialisation had already begun. Native to South Africa and parts of Australia, species of Protea were taken to Hawaii and New Zealand in the 1970s, where their production continues to this day. The plant family itself is thought to be around 300 million years old and includes over 1400 different species, the King Protea being one of the most popular as it is South Africa’s national flower with its magnificent crown-like shape. 8 9
I retraced these few steps to highlight how scientific knowledge of the protea and its popularity occurred in tandem with the empire's expansion. It is no coincidence that botany and scientific exploration flourished alongside colonial pursuits.
Fig.3 Jabulani DhlaminiProtea on auction Aalsmeer, North Holland
The history of (botanical) science was both shaped by and influenced imperial wealth and power.10 The prickly term “embranglements”, coined by plant biologist Banu Subramaniam11, encapsulates these entangled histories and emphasises their tension. The Age of Enlightenment classification trends, such as taxonomy and nomenclature, went hand in hand with the economic motivation to own, study, and cultivate plants from and within colonies. Botanical gardens, in particular, were key sites of scientific knowledge and imperial authority in the colony and the metropole, creating global networks of trade that consolidated power. For example, the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam specialises in plant life from the Cape, having received plenty of seeds, bulbs, and plants from South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries courtesy of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) (Evans). The indoor and garden plants you can see in Amsterdam today are grown from those shipments. The history of botanical science is entangled in colonialism, a knotted web stretching across the globe. Even the naming of the Protea itself privileges a specifically Western patriarchal lens. Subramaniam succinctly states that “colonialism knits the world together, the natural, cultural, political and the planetary”. Nature and culture become inextricably bound and embrangled.
The best example is the representation of the King Protea as South Africa’s national flower. Historian Melanie Boehi has written much of the colonial legacy of Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town. She deftly highlights how flowers act as silent “ambassadors” of the state. Deemed to be apolitical, they, paradoxically, are used to represent the nation-state in a positive light, especially the Protea. During years of international flower shows, most notably throughout apartheid in South Africa, flowers were able to, supposedly, supersede politics. Amidst what commercial proteas specialist Maryke Middelmann calls meagrely “the apartheid row”, there were international boycotts against South Africa’s participation in flower shows and against the sale of proteas. The flowers are given new meanings, imbued with changing cultural importance and weighed down by historical traces, lingering relations of race, labour, and violence. In her investigation of colonial bioprospecting, historian Londa Schiebinger crucially remarks that plants are important natural and cultural artifacts.12 The same must be said of the King Protea.
Boehi, Subramaniam, and postcolonial anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler all embrace the concept of “Naturecultures”13 coined by pioneering feminist scholar Donna Haraway. Moving beyond a modernist understanding of humanity and epistemology as superior to nature, Haraway highlights a complex relationality between nature and culture. We are co-collaborators in the continual processes of life and trade.14 There cannot be a consideration of nature without an understanding of how the material and the semiotic work together. Protean Routes is one means of contemplating the story and life cycle of the protea as a naturalcultural history, a holistic and interdisciplinary approach that can better account for colonial and capitalist dimensions as well as aesthetic desires for the flowers themselves, the accumulated knowledge and passion for their cultivation. In the same way that Gordon describes a ghost, the protea is a culturally coded sign, representative of this embrangled, naturalcultural history.
With its name and the pervasiveness of the Latin language of botany, this ghost is also distinctly tangible, with finger-like petals and fleshy insides. Stoler characterises these trade networks, classification and persisting colonial configurations as “imperial formations”. They are relations of force that remain present and inhabit language, concepts, and social and political structures across various countries and contexts. She also pinpoints the notion of “imperial debris”, the constructed, material remains of these formations which exert material and social effects in the present.15 Protean Routes tracks the imperial formation of the protea flowers, built on a settler colonialism foundation, from Cape Town to Aalsmeer. The King Protea itself can be a type of imperial debris. Stoler is well-versed in using this concept for sites of colonial violence and the material remains of ecological destruction. Imperial debris could also be that of non-human lives, the natural environment forever marked and changed by extractive practices. But can it be rooted in the very soil itself? Each seed, each blooming of a protea as a type of debris gestures more towards its displacement. What is a ghost if not a figure displaced–out of place or time?
Stoler, too, emphasises imperial formations as “past but not over”.16 An important temporal element is at play for the post-colonial as it acts within the present. The King Protea carries with it too much past to ever be genuinely present. Centuries of history, millions of lives grown across the world. Gardening and cultivation are often simply regarded as accumulated knowledge17, especially regarding the various types and new breeds of proteas. A protea today points us to its past and place of growth. Significantly, haunting in sociological or cultural analysis is “the entanglement of past, present and future”.18 The cut flowers of Dhlamini’s proteas here straddle the division between life and death, awaiting their unequivocal demise. Petals and water stain the floor, remains of the flowers. Rather than showing the hustle of the flower market, the bustling auctions, or even the flowers themselves, teeming with life, Dhlamini directs us to the spectral. A loneliness, a space where something is missing: the history of the Protea can finally be addressed.
Avery Gordon writes, “The fundamental sociality of haunting [is] that we are haunted by worldly contacts”.19 The King Protea can be a sign of haunting, but is it not the actual ghost? Turning around to see a solitary vase of flowers standing on the table, shadows of a bouquet, making a once welcome sight into a scene that evokes discomfort. Here, the haunting is social; the real issue is the presence, or lack thereof, of people missing from the story. Enslaved people working on the farms or in the gardens, the Indigenous people providing knowledge on cultivation, the imperial formations – the systems – set in place that enabled a worldwide Protea industry at the expense of people and land through ecological networks.
However, in the case of slavery and the US history of colonialism and racial injustice, Esther Peeren argues that it is not genuinely haunting society in a way in which we can productively reckon with its past, present, and future. We must attend to the ghosts and allow ourselves to be haunted. Peeren and Gordon posit that being uncomfortable is productive in an analytical and critical sense. In contrast, being comfortable is not recognising essential connections about our world's state. Every second of the life story of a framed protea is permeated with discomfort. Attending to the ghosts of the protea flower means facing discomfort and recognising the ugliness in its history. Accepting the haunted past of the protea and all the pain it brings between the Netherlands and South Africa, its spectre of colonial violence over our shoulder is the only way forward.
Copyright Dwaalstêr Editions 2026, KVK 94036322
UNTIL
(1) Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press. 2008.
(2) Gordon, 17
(3) Middelmann, Maryke. Proteas: The Birth of a Worldwide Industry. Xlibris, 2012.
(4) Coetzee, J.M; Littlejohn, G.M. “Protea: A Floricultural Crop from the Cape Floristic Kingdom”. Horticultural Reviews, vol. 26, 2001, pp. 77-112.
(5) ibid.
(6) Middelmann, Maryke. Proteas: The Birth of a Worldwide Industry. Xlibris, 2012.
(7) Fraser & Fraser. The Smallest Kingdom: Plants and Plant Collectors at the Cape of Good Hope, Royal Botanic Gardens, 2011.
(8) Boehi, Melanie. “Radical Stories in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden: Emergent Ecologies’ Challenges to Colonial Narratives and Western Epistemologies.” Environmental Humanities, vol.13, no.1, May 2021, pp. 66-92.
(9) Parvin, P.E. “Proteas – from ‘curiosity’ to ‘commodity’”, Veld & Flora, vol.70, no.4, December 1984, pp.109-111.
(10) Brockway, Lucile. “Science and Colonial Expansion: the Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens.” American Ethnologist: Interdisciplinary Anthropology, vol. 6, no. 3, August 1979, pp.449-465.
(11) Subramaniam, Banu. Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism, University of Washington Press, 2024.
(12) Schiebinger, Londa; Swan, Claudia. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce and Politics in the early Modern World. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
(13) Haraway, Donna. The Haraway Reader. Routledge, 2004.
(14) Pekal, Amy. “Assembling the Natureculture Garden: A Diffractive Ethnography of the Utrecht Oude Hortus”, Utrecht University, 2020.
(15) Stoler, Ann. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, Issue 2, 2008, pp. 191–219.
(16) Stoler, Ann. Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Duke University Press, 2016.
(17) Johnson, Nuala C. “Botanical Gardens and Zoos” from The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge. SAGE Publications. 2011, pp. 99-110.
(18) Peeren, Esther. Attending to Ghosts: Cultural Analysis, Close Reading and the Cultural Imagination. Faculty of the Humanities, Inaugural lecture, no. 611. 27 September 2019. University of Amsterdam.
(19) Gordon
Proteaceae Spectral: The Naturalcultural Hauntingof Colonialism
Evie Evans
Whereas in the nineteenth century, plants, animals, and people from tropical regions were displayed in botanical gardens – imperialistic gestures intended to communicate the ruler’s global ambitions at home – today we can have objects from the tropics delivered to our door.
Susanne Figner, Flamingo Flowers
To speak of colonial ruination is to trace the fragile and durable substance of signs, the visible and visceral senses in which the effects of empire are reactivated and remain.
Ann Stoler, Imperial Debris
Haunting is an encounter in which you touch the ghost, or the ghostly matter of things: The ambiguities, the complexities of power and personhood, the violence, and the hope, the looming and receding actualities, the shadows of our selves and society.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters
Can we be haunted by flowers? Can a flower be a ghost? These were the first questions that came to mind when looking at Jabulani Dhlamini's Protean Routes photography. His photographs in the Netherlands strike a sense of frigidity. Their atmosphere is cold: cold metal frames, boxes of flowers piled and placed high. In the few images of people, they work alone, navigating the dark warehouses, sitting in sterile offices in the desolate early hours.
In contrast to the expected idea of a flower market—the noise and bustle of the industry—Dhlamini chooses to capture the Dutch side with a deep unease. Even in photos with multiple people, they appear solitary—figures standing alone, time and distance between them. Otherwise, they are together as phantom reflections in windows, blurred smudges in the warehouses amongst metal carts. Dhlamini does the expert task of drawing our attention to the actual subject, which is both present and absent: the King Protea.
Packed tightly in boxes, tipped over or the centre of a crime scene of flower heads and water, like an explosion on the ground, the protea flowers are never centre stage – pressed in between other flora – and yet, as Avery Gordon argues of ghosts in the cultural imagination, they demand attention. Do you consider the origin of your Mother’s Day bouquet? Or the complex web of commerce, history, and people that make your local bloemenkiosk possible? Through the empty carts and empty rooms that Dhlamini captures, the protea is a sort of ghost, “a sign telling you a haunting is taking place”.1 I take cues from sociologist Avery Gordon and cultural analyst Esther Peeren, who, in turn, are inspired by Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. They both refer to realms of figures or artistic objects, but how does the relationship between ghosts and haunting change when the ghost is alive as a plant?
Fig.2 Jabulani DhlaminiEmpty trollies after auction Aalsmeer, North Holland
The protea is already a “real” ghost because it is a product of material effects,2 as shown through the photographs of Jabulani Dhlamini and Jansen van Staden. Entire swaths of land have been worked and reserved for protea cultivation, people’s livelihoods, and global logistics defined by a single type of flower. Yet, it has shifted from a living being into an object, something to be owned, studied, and sold. The Proteaceae plant occurs naturally in South Africa, its first written reference dating back to 16053, descriptions of which were first published in the Netherlands in 17374. In 1753, Carl Linnaeus featured his taxonomy of the Protea, dubbing the plant after the Greek God Protea5 – a confusion between two variations of the same species and its resemblance to the artichoke. Not as insightful as one might expect. In the 1770s, Francis Masson, the botanical collector for the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, sent the first seeds of the plant abroad, and by 1774, the first flower successfully grown outside of South Africa was shown at Kew. In 1809, Joseph Knight published his book On the Order of the Plants, which belongs to the natural order of the Proteeae in their cultivation. By the 1830s, protea flowers were the new horticultural trend for the English upper class6 7 – its commercialisation had already begun. Native to South Africa and parts of Australia, species of Protea were taken to Hawaii and New Zealand in the 1970s, where their production continues to this day. The plant family itself is thought to be around 300 million years old and includes over 1400 different species, the King Protea being one of the most popular as it is South Africa’s national flower with its magnificent crown-like shape. 8 9
I retraced these few steps to highlight how scientific knowledge of the protea and its popularity occurred in tandem with the empire's expansion. It is no coincidence that botany and scientific exploration flourished alongside colonial pursuits.
Fig.3 Jabulani DhlaminiProtea on auction Aalsmeer, North Holland
The history of (botanical) science was both shaped by and influenced imperial wealth and power.10 The prickly term “embranglements”, coined by plant biologist Banu Subramaniam11, encapsulates these entangled histories and emphasises their tension. The Age of Enlightenment classification trends, such as taxonomy and nomenclature, went hand in hand with the economic motivation to own, study, and cultivate plants from and within colonies. Botanical gardens, in particular, were key sites of scientific knowledge and imperial authority in the colony and the metropole, creating global networks of trade that consolidated power. For example, the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam specialises in plant life from the Cape, having received plenty of seeds, bulbs, and plants from South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries courtesy of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) (Evans). The indoor and garden plants you can see in Amsterdam today are grown from those shipments. The history of botanical science is entangled in colonialism, a knotted web stretching across the globe. Even the naming of the Protea itself privileges a specifically Western patriarchal lens. Subramaniam succinctly states that “colonialism knits the world together, the natural, cultural, political and the planetary”. Nature and culture become inextricably bound and embrangled.
The best example is the representation of the King Protea as South Africa’s national flower. Historian Melanie Boehi has written much of the colonial legacy of Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town. She deftly highlights how flowers act as silent “ambassadors” of the state. Deemed to be apolitical, they, paradoxically, are used to represent the nation-state in a positive light, especially the Protea. During years of international flower shows, most notably throughout apartheid in South Africa, flowers were able to, supposedly, supersede politics. Amidst what commercial proteas specialist Maryke Middelmann calls meagrely “the apartheid row”, there were international boycotts against South Africa’s participation in flower shows and against the sale of proteas. The flowers are given new meanings, imbued with changing cultural importance and weighed down by historical traces, lingering relations of race, labour, and violence. In her investigation of colonial bioprospecting, historian Londa Schiebinger crucially remarks that plants are important natural and cultural artifacts.12 The same must be said of the King Protea.
Boehi, Subramaniam, and postcolonial anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler all embrace the concept of “Naturecultures”13 coined by pioneering feminist scholar Donna Haraway. Moving beyond a modernist understanding of humanity and epistemology as superior to nature, Haraway highlights a complex relationality between nature and culture. We are co-collaborators in the continual processes of life and trade.14 There cannot be a consideration of nature without an understanding of how the material and the semiotic work together. Protean Routes is one means of contemplating the story and life cycle of the protea as a naturalcultural history, a holistic and interdisciplinary approach that can better account for colonial and capitalist dimensions as well as aesthetic desires for the flowers themselves, the accumulated knowledge and passion for their cultivation. In the same way that Gordon describes a ghost, the protea is a culturally coded sign, representative of this embrangled, naturalcultural history.
With its name and the pervasiveness of the Latin language of botany, this ghost is also distinctly tangible, with finger-like petals and fleshy insides. Stoler characterises these trade networks, classification and persisting colonial configurations as “imperial formations”. They are relations of force that remain present and inhabit language, concepts, and social and political structures across various countries and contexts. She also pinpoints the notion of “imperial debris”, the constructed, material remains of these formations which exert material and social effects in the present.15 Protean Routes tracks the imperial formation of the protea flowers, built on a settler colonialism foundation, from Cape Town to Aalsmeer. The King Protea itself can be a type of imperial debris. Stoler is well-versed in using this concept for sites of colonial violence and the material remains of ecological destruction. Imperial debris could also be that of non-human lives, the natural environment forever marked and changed by extractive practices. But can it be rooted in the very soil itself? Each seed, each blooming of a protea as a type of debris gestures more towards its displacement. What is a ghost if not a figure displaced–out of place or time?
Stoler, too, emphasises imperial formations as “past but not over”.16 An important temporal element is at play for the post-colonial as it acts within the present. The King Protea carries with it too much past to ever be genuinely present. Centuries of history, millions of lives grown across the world. Gardening and cultivation are often simply regarded as accumulated knowledge17, especially regarding the various types and new breeds of proteas. A protea today points us to its past and place of growth. Significantly, haunting in sociological or cultural analysis is “the entanglement of past, present and future”.18 The cut flowers of Dhlamini’s proteas here straddle the division between life and death, awaiting their unequivocal demise. Petals and water stain the floor, remains of the flowers. Rather than showing the hustle of the flower market, the bustling auctions, or even the flowers themselves, teeming with life, Dhlamini directs us to the spectral. A loneliness, a space where something is missing: the history of the Protea can finally be addressed.
Avery Gordon writes, “The fundamental sociality of haunting [is] that we are haunted by worldly contacts”.19 The King Protea can be a sign of haunting, but is it not the actual ghost? Turning around to see a solitary vase of flowers standing on the table, shadows of a bouquet, making a once welcome sight into a scene that evokes discomfort. Here, the haunting is social; the real issue is the presence, or lack thereof, of people missing from the story. Enslaved people working on the farms or in the gardens, the Indigenous people providing knowledge on cultivation, the imperial formations – the systems – set in place that enabled a worldwide Protea industry at the expense of people and land through ecological networks.
However, in the case of slavery and the US history of colonialism and racial injustice, Esther Peeren argues that it is not genuinely haunting society in a way in which we can productively reckon with its past, present, and future. We must attend to the ghosts and allow ourselves to be haunted. Peeren and Gordon posit that being uncomfortable is productive in an analytical and critical sense. In contrast, being comfortable is not recognising essential connections about our world's state. Every second of the life story of a framed protea is permeated with discomfort. Attending to the ghosts of the protea flower means facing discomfort and recognising the ugliness in its history. Accepting the haunted past of the protea and all the pain it brings between the Netherlands and South Africa, its spectre of colonial violence over our shoulder is the only way forward.