The Ethnic Forest Culture Garden at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden is organized around relationships between plants and people. Its institutional page describes displays of medicinal, food, religious and literary-art plants. The garden’s 2015 account reports 359 cultivated ethnobotanical species.
From the journal
Plants and People at XTBG’s Ethnic Forest Culture Garden
The garden’s themed displays connect plants with food, belief, medicine, literature and the materials of everyday life.
In the same city · Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture ↗Plants in more than one human story
Living plants and specimens tell different stories
The garden’s four zones make the links tangible: food plants, medicinal plants, plants in religious practice, and those connected with literature and art. The institutional description also connects forest, water and fields in its account of Dai ecological thought. Rather than separating a plant from its setting, the garden arranges living specimens and landscape features to show how human practices meet the tropical forest.
Attention includes asking who speaks
The garden description gives each zone a particular texture. Food plants include flowers and leaves eaten as vegetables; medicinal displays feature plants associated with Dai medicine and eight named formula groups; the religious section places Buddhist garden plants beside a constructed sacred forest. The literary-art area follows writing materials from banana leaves and bamboo to palm-leaf manuscripts and paper made from paper mulberry bark. Plants here are presented through uses, stories and materials, not only botanical names.