Dr Diego Molina is an IASH Environmental Humanities Fellow for 2026, and currently a Visiting Researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. A botanist by training, he transitioned into human geography and environmental history to explore the evolving relationships between people and plants. On this topic, he has published widely in journals such as Environmental History, Economic Botany, and Global Environments. His latest book, Planting a City in the Tropical Andes (Routledge, 2024), is his third monograph. Before moving into the environmental humanities, Diego worked for several years as a botanist in Colombia, contributing to scientific expeditions, species discovery, and the development of public policies for plant conservation. He is currently Associate Editor of Plants Perspective. Prior to his role at Kew, he held prestigious fellowships as a Rachel Carson Fellow in Munich and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow.
In the 19th century, the movement of ornamental plants across the Atlantic became a key aspect of both European horticultural practices and the rise of neo-colonial power dynamics in the Andes. During my time at IASH, I am writing a book on these movements of plants, revealing how the fascination with ‘exotic plants’ in Europe spurred intense botanical exploration and the extraction of living plants from the cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador.
In the book (tentatively titled "The nineteenth-century ornamental exchange: plants and urban spaces in Europe and the Andes"), I am showing how upon their arrival in Europe, previously wild orchids, anthuriums and other species were transformed into commodities for sale. However, the commodification of these plants was not simply about importing flora. It involved a complex network of actors: large nurseries imported and sold these plants, while greenhouse engineers created the artificial tropical environments required to sustain them. Meanwhile, hybridisers produced previously unseen forms of diversity, which botanical illustrators further heightened, making them even more desirable to European audiences. Paradoxically, in the Tropical Andes, where these plants were native, members of emerging local elites were busy creating public gardens and parks as part of the modernisation of cities such as Quito and Bogotá. To this end, they introduced a vast number of plants historically used in the ornamentation of European cities, which, to their eyes, were not ‘exotic’ but symbols of ‘progress’. In their view, local and uncultivated flora represented backwardness, while streets planted with elms or planes were a mark of ‘civilization’.
Thus, the differentiated flow of ornamental plants across the Atlantic reveals how asymmetrical power relationships shaped aesthetic ideals in both Europe and the Andes, transforming the global distribution of plants in a way unseen since the 16th-century Columbian Exchange.