Becoming a Tree Again

I’ve been to Kew Gardens in London, and it’s difficult not to think of it as a collection of things: trees, plants, glazed surfaces, iron structures, condensation, paths, buildings. But yesterday, The Guardian reported on an unusually revealing problem inside one of its most famous structures. The Palm House, opened in 1848, is deteriorating and needs a major renovation, including replacing some 16,000 panes of glass. But there’s a catch: the »rusty and warped« Victorian building contains around 1,000 plants, some of which are too large or fragile to move. Kew is propagating plants from seeds and cuttings, moving others elsewhere, and preparing to fell some of its oldest specimens. The renovation is scheduled to begin in 2027.¹

»Some things can be preserved. Others can only be made possible again«

It’s a peculiar form of conservation. To save the building, Kew may have to sacrifice some of the trees it was built to protect.

This raises a stranger question: what exactly are we trying to preserve? The distinction between preserving a thing and preserving what it makes possible is enormous. We often preserve the substrate when what we actually care about is the capacity.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which stores backup copies of the world’s crop diversity deep inside a mountain in the Arctic, doesn’t preserve a field. It preserves the possibility that a crop can be grown again. More than 1.4 million seed samples are now stored there.² A seed is valuable not because it’s a tiny museum piece, but because it contains a future: the possibility of beginning again.

It’s the same with books. We could preserve every book ever printed and still lose the act of reading. A book is an instrument for doing something: spending time inside another person’s mind through the manipulation of coded symbols. What needs preserving is not necessarily the object, but the capacity. A future library might not preserve books at all, but the conditions for reading: time, attention, serendipity, and the possibility of wandering through another person’s mind.

Sometimes the capacity is even harder to separate from its surroundings. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari used the relationship between an orchid and a wasp as an example. The orchid resembles a female wasp and attracts the male, which carries its pollen to another flower. The orchid’s capacity to reproduce is partly distributed into its relationship with another organism. The wasp becomes part of the orchid’s reproductive system; the orchid becomes part of the wasp’s behaviour.³

The »thing« we’re trying to preserve may actually be a system of relationships. This is why conservation is difficult. Moving a plant away from its habitat may preserve its genes while losing the ecological relationships that made its existence possible. Put a seed in a vault and you preserve its potential, but not the soil, climate, insects, fungi, farmers, and traditions that once surrounded it. Some things can be preserved. Others can only be made possible again.

This suggests a different definition of preservation. It isn’t really saving the past. It’s constraining the future so that some aspects of the past remain reachable.

Pop art legend Andy Warhol once wrote »I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.«⁴ There’s something deeper in that than environmentalism. Preservation is an active decision not to close off possibilities.

This might also offer a more useful way of thinking about political conservatism. Political theorist Edmund Burke described society as a partnership between »those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born«.⁵ Preservation, in this sense, isn’t about freezing the present. It’s about refusing to close off the future for people who aren’t here yet.

Kew’s Palm House makes the paradox visible. The building is being renovated so that it can continue to house plants. Some plants have to leave the building so that the building can survive. Kew isn’t simply preserving a collection. It’s dispersing pieces of it across other places, in the hope that some of the relationships that sustain it can eventually be reconstructed.

And isn’t the ultimate success of a botanical garden that its plants return to the wild? Isn’t the most successful act of preservation the one that makes preservation unnecessary? Perhaps the thing worth preserving isn’t the tree, or the building, or even the species, but the system that allows the tree to become a tree again.

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