ABSTRACT
The chapter focusses on the Tropical World (TR), Leeds, Roundhay Park, one of the UK’s most popular garden tourist attractions and home to the largest collection of tropical plants outside Kew Gardens. Mostly advertised as a family leisure attraction, its repository of flora and fauna from extinguishing species residing erstwhile colonised lands, seems to reproduce the taxonomic logic of imperialism in contexts of mass-tourist consumption. Such a conventional form of ‘heterology’ combines the medical-material qualities of otherness-as excess with the ethereal of tropical/exotic atmospheres. Hence, the TR is a post-colonial experiment in achieving the portability of atmospheric values from the tropics to the former colonial centre (alien flora and fauna are relocated alongside their recreated micro-climates so that the species survive). With a focus on the global aesthetic potential of nature, which simultaneously advocates an ethical order of cross-generational sustainability, today the garden facilitates a multisensory walk into future potentialities regarding environmental protection. The chapter debates the ethics and aesthetics of this experiment, which prioritises sustainable futures over colonial pasts.
