Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

node

Kew was the central node of nineteenth-century British botanical transfer: it held reference collections, identified and named economic plants, and coordinated the movement of living material between colonial gardens using Wardian cases. Its Economic Botany Collection retains tea samples, processing materials and trade specimens that document the industrial side of the crop. Kew's role in the tea story is infrastructural rather than dramatic — it belongs to the wider apparatus by which plants of commercial value were surveyed, moved and naturalised across the empire, alongside the Calcutta and Saharanpur botanic gardens that actually received Fortune's consignments. It is included here because that apparatus, not any single collector, is what made the transplanting possible.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.