Dr Diego Molina
Environmental Humanities Fellow, January - April 2026
Home Institution: Royal Holloway, University of London
Dr Diego Molina is 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.
Project title: The ornamental exchange: transatlantic urbanism and plants in the Andes and Europe
In 1899, Albert Millican died in the remote region of La Victoria, Colombia, while collecting plants for the Royal Horticultural Society of London. Before his death, he had sent over 12,000 orchids, anthuriums, and ferns to London to feed the flourishing market of ‘exotic’ plants. This research explores the commodification of Andean ornamental plants once they arrived in Europe and the network of actors involved in the process. It studies how, whereas large nurseries imported and sold these plants, greenhouse engineers created the artificial tropical environments necessary to sustain them. Meanwhile, hybridisers produced previously unseen forms of diversity, which botanical illustrators further enhanced, making these plants even more desirable to European audiences. While this was happening in Europe, Casiano Salcedo, a self-taught gardener, was commissioned by the Treasury Office to transform the colonial squares of Bogotá into modern gardens. To accomplish this project, he established contact with Vilmorin nurseries in Paris, from which he imported more than 20,000 plants common in European green spaces. This research also examines how members of Colombia’s emerging social elite, committed to modernising their cities, promoted the creation of European-inspired public gardens and parks furnished with European species, which they saw as undeniable symbols of ‘progress’. Drawing on a wide range of historical sources, including literate accounts, journals, images, maps, and biological collections, this research dissects the 19th-century transatlantic circulation of plants. It concludes that unequal power dynamics and neo-colonial geopolitics endowed plants with distinct aesthetic meanings in both Andean and European cities, and how this symbolic differentiation propelled a drastic change in the global distribution of plants on a scale not seen since the 16th-century Columbian Exchange.