Clones, Zones, and Migrants: Politics, migrations, and possibilities of the plant nursery trade
Name of Event/Lecture
Clones, Zones, and Migrants: Politics, migrations, and possibilities of the plant nursery trade
Name of Speaker
Leah Kahler
Location
Via Zoom
You are cordially invited to a lecture by Leah Kahler:
Clones, Zones, and Migrants: Politics, migrations, and possibilities of the plant nursery trade
Date: 28th October 2025
Time: 9:40-10:40 pm
Zoom Link: https://nus-sg.zoom.us/j/82538213318?pwd=qIF1Oe76y0cpI0nUQVwYkLEnIp5wFo.1
It’s a familiar scene: A tree arrives to the construction site, swaddled in burlap, wrapped with twine, and strapped down to the bed of an eighteen-wheeler after a long journey to site. The landscape designer who carefully selected every aspect of it— its genus and species, its caliper, maybe even down to the copyrighted cultivar—works with the landscape crew to carefully place the tree— rootball and all—into place, just so. But what relational geographies, market forces, federal policies, horticultural ideologies, and labor preceded this plant’s arrival on site? If a “weed is just a plant out of place,” where do plants belong? What are we to make of plants’ movements across space?
This lecture examines the socio-ecological geographies of the global nursery trade, thinking through the politics, migrations, and possibilities of diverse forms of cultivation.
About the Author
Leah Kahler is a landscape designer and Research Assistant Professor with the Gulf Coast Climate Futures Project at Tulane University School of Architecture and the Built Environment. Her research focuses on the socio-ecological legacies of the plantation landscape, documenting urban-rural material flows through sites of labor, extraction, and cultivation. Leah’s current research investigates the movement of plants via the global nursery trade using ethnographic fieldwork and archival methods. Leah was the 2024-2025 at the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania and co-editor of the 15th volume of LUNCH design journal, THICK.
This lecture is a part of the BLA/MLA Elective AR5954B “Botanical Urbanism: Mapping socio-ecological territories of horticulture expositions in Asia”, led by Dr. Xiaoxuan Lu.