Tour Through the Botanical Garden
October 7, 2026
EcoStories Team came together with students and scholars in the field of environmental humanities at the University of Graz Botanical Garden. The Queer Botany Team gave a tour as part of the project “From Roots to Words: How We Speak About Plants (and Us).”
The project aims to foster more queer-inclusive teaching practices in plant science and explores how botany itself can be approached from a queer perspective. The Queer Botany Team guided visitors through the University of Graz’s Botanical Garden.
By stopping at notable spots, the EcoStories Team and the visitors examined how traditional botanical language has historically reinforced binary gender norms and
colonial hierarchies.
Along the way, the tour helped the visitors to explore how scientific names of plants
often celebrate colonial pasts, how plants serve as cultural identifiers and the possibilities of opening up to diverse classification systems. Finally, the Queer Botany Team provided ways to look past the “male and female flower” trope to uncover the true diversity in plant life, reflecting the project’s goal to seek alternatives to binary botanical language.