Urban Spaces, Plants, and People in the Nineteenth-Century Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract

Urban Spaces, Plants, and People in the Nineteenth-Century Bogotá, Colombia. Despite recent efforts to understand the uses of plants in Latin American cities, we know little about ethnobotanical practices in the pre-industrial nineteenth-century urban environments of this region. In order to address this gap in the existing literature, I examined the uses of ornamental, edible, and medicinal plants alongside “non-timber forest products” (NTFPs) in daily life in Bogotá (Colombia) between 1830 and 1910. Primary and secondary data were collected from textual and iconographic historical sources in libraries, archives, museums, and herbaria in Colombia and the United Kingdom. The results suggest that access to urban spaces such as patios, solares, or adjacent ecosystems broadly defined the ways that people related to and used plants, which in turn illustrates how social hierarchies influenced botanical knowledge. This study represents an initial effort to explore the heretofore neglected history of ways of using plants in Latin American cities in the period immediately prior to their modernization.