For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh will introduce how planting was central to colonialism and explain why it is vital that we recognise the ongoing effects of colonial botany and the plantation system. They will discuss how gardens – from botanical collections to municipal parks – are historical sites of exclusion and labour as well as leisure and enjoyment, detailing the hierarchies that exist within these spaces, and describing how artists have actively sought to decolonise these spaces through planting with reference to ongoing projects in London.

Queer Nature explores the little-known, often-overlooked and rare intimate behaviour of the botanical world. Investigating the relationships between ecological thought and queer theory to celebrate the multitude of shapes, gender, sexes and colours that exist around us. Landscape architect Céline Baumann will describe the journey that led her to discover and examine diversity within the plant kingdom.

About 400 years ago, during the scientific revolution, science and soul were drastically separated, propelling humanity into four centuries of scientific exploration based on empiricism and rationality. Although the huge development of science has given us many benefits, its predominance has made us into detached observers fundamentally disconnected from each other and from nature. 

Musician Sarah Angliss (London, UK) draws on the botanical writing of Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century Christian mystic, to help make sense of her own experiences of illness, healing and the turn of the season while the city is in lockdown. Sarah will immerse us in a sonic fever dream, using fragments of Hildegard’s texts on herbal medicine to explore her personal experiences of fever as she examines Hildegard’s ecstatic visions.

The Amazon Rainforest is the world's most abundant pharmacopeia - filled with countless plants that are used traditionally to heal physical, psychological and spiritual ailments. The traditional healers who live there say they receive their knowledge as transmissions from the plants themselves during periods of solitary retreat in the jungle.

Leading scientist of plant cognition, Monica Gagliano (Australia), presents a new understanding of the vegetal world. She argues that, in order to understand plant sentience we need to radically rethink our definitions of intelligence and consciousness to move away from a human-centric model. Through a survey of plant capabilities from sight, smell and touch to communication, the podcast will challenge our notion of intelligence, presenting a vision of plant life that is more sophisticated than most imagine.

Camden Art Centre has commissioned Kirk Barley to compose the music to accompany The Botanical Mind Online programme. He has adopted the Fibonacci sequence, a naturally occurring pattern that repeatedly appears in the botanical world, as an underpinning tuning system (or scales) for the compositions. The music explores how intricate number patterns found in nature can be channelled to generate synthesised rhythmic and melodic patterns.