Noget om kulturarv, botanik og ikke-botanik – for kunsthistorikere

This paper addresses a particular kind of plant blindness that concerns the cultural heritage of the domesticated crop plants. Our heritage of heirloom vegetables, fruits, cereals and other crop and culture plants seem to escape our institutional cultural memory and its care is to a remarkable extent now left in the hands of hobby seed savers. This paper looks for the roots of this particular type of plant blindness in the thinking of Carl Lineaus and his central taxonomy separating nature from non-natur – botany from non-botany. I address the traditions of botanical illustration in seventeenth-century florilegia, Flora Danica (1761-1883) and centrally the cereal, vegetable and fruit illustrations of Ellen Backe (1891 – 1976) created at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University between 1933 and 1958. I conclude by proposing that the old breeds and heirloom varieties of our domesticated plants could be regarded as ghosts of naturecultures past: Nicheless living dead that are roaming seed saver gardens long after their naturalcultural habitats have disappeared.