The Ethnic Forest Culture Garden at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden arranges plants under four themes: medicine, food, religion, and literature and art. Its 2015 institutional account reported 82 families and 359 cultivated ethnobotanical species. The layout shows how a botanical garden can make relationships between plants and human practice visible to visitors.
From the journal
How a Botanical Garden Organizes Plant Knowledge
Four themed areas at the botanical garden present plants through food, medicine, religion and literature, revealing how institutions interpret human-plant relationships.
In the same city · Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture ↗Four ways to organize a garden
Knowledge has a setting
Labels and planted collections translate specialist work into a public walk through the garden. Visitors can move from a plant’s form to the connections the display highlights—food, medicine, belief or literature. The four themes are an institutional map of selected examples, a way to begin noticing how plants enter human life.