During his last interview in St. Louis before returning to Dublin, Ireland, the incoming director of the Missouri Botanical Garden let drop a bombshell.
“I would love the Garden to be able to play a role in helping to see Katherine Dunham’s dream to be achieved: to have a national botanic garden in Haiti,” Dr. Peter Wyse Jackson told The St. Louis American.
This may seem like an enormous and unlikely undertaking for a new director to suggest, when he doesn’t even take charge until September; but Wyse Jackson would only be picking up where he left off.
“One of my first visits to St. Louis was when I came to meet Katherine Dunham, when she was in East St. Louis,” Wyse Jackson said.
“She had a property in Port-au-Prince, and she asked me if I would help set up a botanic garden in Haiti. So I came to see her and we talked about that, then I spent several years going back and forth to Haiti to see if we could get the project going.”
Cameron Brohman, who continues to work in international development from his home base of Toronto, said Wyse Jackson was recommended to Miss Dunham by Dr. Peter Raven, whose position at the Missouri Botanical Garden will be taken by Wyse Jackson in September.
Wyse Jackson’s position at the time (ca. 1990) as director of the global umbrella group Botanic Gardens Conservation International made him the ideal choice of international liaison.
“Dr. Peter Wyse Jackson then organized a trip to Haiti with two botanists from New York, who spent a week on site with me,” Brohman told The American.
“The result of that trip was a development plan, about 60 pages long, to transform the property into the Katherine Dunham Botanic Garden.”
The plan for those 50 acres in the Martissant neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, however, has remained only a plan.
“Katherine Dunham’s dream of having a botanic garden in Haiti never was achieved for various reasons, including the political and social disruptions,” Wyse Jackson said.
Dunham lived on the property until Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in the military coup of September 1991. In 1992 the world-renowned choreographer and anthropologist went on a 47-day hunger strike in East St. Louis, to protest the Bush administration’s policy toward Haitian refugees.
In more recent years, armed gangs have at times used the garden refuge as a stronghold.
Brohman visited Haiti on other business just before Christmas 2009, two weeks before the devastating earthquake. He checked and found that Dunham’s property was being administered as a park by the Haitian government, named after the neighborhood in which it is located, rather than Miss Dunham.
“It was established and registered as the Katherine Dunham Botanic Garden,” Brohman said.
Brohman said that in 2004, two years before she died, Dunham left the property in the hands of “her Haitian lawyers,” though the Haitian government, the Organization of American States and the government of Canada all had stakes in the plan for the national garden.
A hospital for the environment
Particularly after a devastating earthquake, the idea of reviving a plan for a botanic garden might seem a very low priority. Wyse Jackson and Brohman emphatically argue to the contrary.
“Some people would say the last thing Haiti needs is a botanic garden. My answer is it’s probably one of the first things it needs,” Wyse Jackson said.
“It would be a center for horticulture, a center for training, a center for the introduction of economic plants.”
Brohman said he “backs up Peter Wyse Jackson 100 percent.”
“Haiti needs a botanic garden before it needs a lot of other things, because it has a terrible environmental predicament, an ongoing catastrophe,” Brohman said, referring to the island’s nearly complete deforestation.
“Working toward a botanical garden is working toward biodiversity, environmental restoration, economic botany – and in a country like Haiti, that should be the backbone of its economy, its sustainability.”
Brohman uses a metaphor that will be familiar to the millions who have followed earthquake recover efforts in Haiti.
“This is the same as building a hospital in the middle of a war. A botanical garden does for a sick environment exactly what a hospital does for sick people,” Brohman said.
“Haiti needs it as badly or worse as it needs anything. Part of the reconstruction of Haiti will involve returning to an agriculture-based economy, and a botanic garden and science has a huge role to play in that.”
Getting from here to there – once Wyse Jackson takes over at the Missouri Botanical Garden in September – is another matter.
“There are some unanswered questions,” Brohman said. “Who actually is in charge of that property? And there is restoring the name, which somehow has been dropped.”
Though Brohman said he “wouldn’t want to give anyone advice for navigating the Haitian political spectrum at this point,” he recognized a need for a public education effort to stress “the importance of a botanic garden and horticulture and the value of it to the economy.”
Brohman sees it as fitting that this project could be revived as part of the transfer of leadership at the Missouri Botanical Garden from Peter Raven to Peter Wyse Jackson.
“Miss Dunham and Peter Raven knew each other, so she arranged for myself and her to have lunch with Peter, and we discussed her desire to turn her property in Haiti into a national botanic garden,” Brohman said.
“Dr. Raven then contacted Peter Wyse Jackson, since he was head of all the gardens internationally and had a program to start botanic gardens. The program began in St. Louis, so it is coming back full circle to the Missouri Botanical Garden. It all started there.”