Meet the ‘outspoken gardener’ who sees possibilities of an otherwise. During the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, gardener Sui Searle founded the platform Decolonising the Garden and the newsletter Radical to create a shared space for underrepresented voices in gardening and horticulture.

As Sui Searle and I walk through the expansive Knole Park in Sevenoaks, Kent, on a bright autumn day, a wild deer with magnificent antlers stops us on our path. We look around and realise that in fact, several deer are around us, nestled amid the grass and decaying copper leaves. The moment is fleeting, but a reminder that if we stop to notice what’s around us, we may discover the unexpected.

That sense of possibility runs through Searle’s approach to gardening, into her creation Decolonise the Garden, which focuses on bringing a decolonial lens and anti-racism perspective to horticulture, and to the accompanying newsletter Radicle, which platforms a variety of writers working with or adjacent to gardening including reflections on land justice, queer ecology, and the colonial connections between English gardens and the Himalayan mountains. Describing herself as an “outspoken gardener”, Searle came into horticulture as a career change from the financial services industry twenty years ago, looking for a greater connection with the natural world. “I don’t have a romantic story about gardening,” she says, recounting a recent conversation at the community garden where she works. “I wanted to feel in touch with the seasons and the earth and the landscape. It wasn’t because I had this wild urge to garden.”

It was George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and the ensuing resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, that prompted Searle to found Decolonise the Garden. Three years later, the platform has become a beacon within an industry that all too often discounts and overlooks vital, underrepresented voices when it comes to race, class, gender and more. “It was such an unusual and strange moment, but it was almost like this mass awakening,” says Searle. “When I saw the reaction, and in some cases complete non-reactions within my sphere in gardening and horticulture, I just felt like I had to speak up. It just felt like the responsible thing to do.” Here, Searle speaks on the challenges of changing structures, starting difficult conversations and the importance of slowing down.

Suyin: You describe Decolonising the Garden as “seeking possibilities for an otherwise”. Can you tell me a bit more about that philosophy?

Sui: I think I came to that line reading On Decoloniality by Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, and they talk about how we live a life full of options. Half the time we live not understanding that we are all the time choosing, all the time taking options. So for me, it’s about being more conscious and aware and intentional. Things don’t have to be the way we think they are. They aren’t just like that, they are conscious, they are options that we enact all the time.

Suyin: How would you describe Decolonise the Garden and how it links with the exploration of these possibilities for an otherwise?

Sui: For me, it’s about normalising having these conversations around justice. Initially this was around anti-racism and racial justice, but this extends and is interconnected with land, climate, food and social justice too. I think so often people are afraid of having these conversations. People who might tentatively start may get shut down by others, or those who are very uncomfortable by it will feel challenged or want to stick their heads in the sand and not confront these things. I think there’s a lot of value to be had just by demonstrating that it is okay, we can have these conversations. Even if you might not have a full understanding or a fully formed idea, it’s still worth talking about. Because we’re never going to get to a better place if we don’t discuss things and just avoiding things is not going to help us either.

Suyin: How would you say the gardening and horticulture industry has, if at all changed, from that time in 2020?

Sui: I think there’s definitely more awareness. I’m not convinced how deep the changes have gone, necessarily. Particularly in those early days, people latch on to very superficial representation politics that doesn’t really lead to either change or understanding. It’s very easy to do that. But actually, the systems and the structures all stay the same.

So really what fundamentally changes? I think you can particularly see that in national politics: representation doesn’t mean anything. You can still have the same oppression going on, you can still have all the same structures that are still underpinning everything. So I feel very similarly, in the horticultural world, that yes, people are more willing to engage in the conversations, but a lot of it has felt quite superficial.

I don’t say that with any kind of judgement as to whether that is bad or good - that’s just how it seems to be. And I think there are conversations to be had there, then, about how we build new things and build something different and move away from just trying to change what is already there, when you could say that they were fundamentally built on structures that are unequal and unjust.

Suyin: What are some of the things that come to mind for you when we talk about these different ways of functioning?

Sui: That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to start Radicle. Because then I could put that into practice, by raising other people’s voices and letting them have agency on what they want to say and how they want to say it.

I don’t think it’s easy doing things differently. It’s not easy and I think you can start by just doing really small things in your own daily life. In particular, how we structure our relationships, based on domination and based on hierarchies and binaries, is in our life everywhere all the time - to break them down is a constant practice.

Suyin: You’ve used your platform a lot recently to share information and awareness about what’s currently happening in Israel and Palestine. I wonder if you can share a bit about your approach to this, and your way of processing these events? I’m particularly thinking of your post: a story of colonisation as told through the olive tree.

Sui: I actually think it’s not that dissimilar speaking up in 2020 about anti-racism and Black Lives Matter because again, this whole horrific, latest iteration of this situation in Israel and Palestine - it hasn’t just started. My introduction to it was several years ago now. I’m definitely not an expert but I also know something.

With the olive trees, I think people make these issues more complicated than they are sometimes. While there’s been a lot of history, when you look at the fundamentals of it, it’s not that hard. People are being violently pushed off their land and out of their homes. That, to me, doesn’t seem hard to understand. It’s not just about the people, either: it’s about the Earth and the ecology and the plants - it’s not only the people that are harmed. I think the olive tree just tells that story. They’ve been there for hundreds of years, and they are being uprooted and destroyed and killed.

Suyin: One definition of pluriverse, from the book Pluriverse: A Post-development Dictionary, is: “transformative initiatives and alternatives to the currently dominant processes of globalised development, including its structural roots in modernity, capitalism, state domination and masculinist values.” I wonder if that resonates with you?

Sui: For me, so much of it comes back to us, putting certain things above other things. We always elevate one thing above another. We have this separation, and then these hierarchies, where we believe that some things are superior. I can’t help but think that whenever I look at all of the systems and places where things break down, that we have lost touch with that side of ourselves that values all beings and all sides and all parts of ourselves equally.

Suyin: I think a lot about a talk that you did for the Plant Fair at the Horniman Museum in London, UK, earlier this year where you spoke about thinking of nature as kin - so treating nature with the same care and love that we do in our familial relationships. How does that show up for you in daily life?

Sui: One of my favourite things to do in the garden is to sit and do nothing, and to commune with the plants and the air, and the wildlife that’s in the garden and just listen, observe and watch the sun and the moon and everything that’s around me. So often, we’re rushing. Part of that rushing is that we keep repeating the same mistakes again and we don’t listen. We’re just in this “constant”, what we call progress, or growth or whatever it is that we’ve been kind of indoctrinated with. We’re not very good at being slow or still or quiet.

In the garden, I do try to be slow and that’s what I enjoy the most. I think that comes back to the connection thing - why I wanted to garden in the first place was to have more connection. And so when I started gardening, I realised that so much of it was about domination and control, and not necessarily about healthy and generative connections.

Suyin: There seems to be a bit more of a mainstreaming, now, of the view that not everything in gardening must be perfect and controlled.

Sui: I definitely think that idea is growing. There’s a growing awareness that we are not the most important beings in the garden.