Growing Concerns: Plants and Their Roots in the Past

Abstract

Plant remains have long been a source of information about the distant past in archaeology, but are undertheorized or even overlooked in the field of contemporary archaeology. This article uses the example of a derelict nineteenth-century landscape garden in a town on the northwestern coast of Norway to show how novel insights about plants can be developed which acknowledge both their past and living present, without reducing them to colonizer, universal taxonomies or proxies for a human past.