Charis Ford Morrison Boke

Selected Works & Activities

Tendril, Echo, Palimpsest: A Brief Cultural History of the Benjamin Rush Medicinal Garden at the Mutter Museum [excerpt]

I am on Lenape Haki-nk, Lenni Lenape land during this work, along the Lenape Sipu, (settler name: Delaware River). Even though neither the settler U.S. Federal Government nor the settler State of Pennsylvania recognize the Lenape and other Indigenous nations that live within the lands seized under William Penn's name, the Lenape are still here.

The Mutter Museum sits on 22nd Street in Philadelphia, a city block or two away from the river. I can't quite see the water from here, though, as the city built up the ground leading up to the river. Approaching it from this, the east side, there's a steep drop to the riverside via stairs or ramp to the greenway park and its trails.

I walk out the side door of the museum, into the flagstone paved area graced by wide stone staircases on either side. I look up and to my left—the brick wall inside which the Historical Medical Library's archives are held. Past it, a parking lot, and 21st street's cafes.

 I look straight ahead, over the stone wall that keeps a small child who might trundle along the wall from falling four feet or so into the azalea bushes in the garden. Across the garden, the broad masonry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Philadelphia is staid in the steep sunlight. I turn right and pass a sign telling me I am entering the Benjamin Rush Medicinal Garden—a sign erected in (date) after the most recent renaming.

Now I'm down where the plants are, below the impossibly tall holly tree—the Tree of Cos, which figures prominently in all records, a gift from [Greece]. Here, wedding parties in the white garden host intimate evenings of dance and laughter, bringing in much-needed financial stability for the museum ("Sir John Templeton Veranda and Medicinal Herb Garden – Events at College of Physicians of Philadelphia" n.d.).

Now I step across the hot pavers towards the herb circle, where indigo and thyme and aconite grow inside neat beds, where the scrappy and irregularly shaped nature of the many medicines means that the garden vibrates with texture.

The eye is disrupted by unexpected protrusions of plant parts not bred to within an inch of cultivar life. The old medicines and the new medicines hold court, strong enough to warrant occasional labels warning the visitor not to consume any plant parts.

There's a shade garden, a water garden, a hot and dry area. Some medicines here I know, others I remain curious about. I sit with my back to the wrought iron fence along 22nd street, with its firmly locked gate, and look across the lot, and imagine back through time, all the ways this space has been many places.

Land always holds more than one story. Though it is tempting to understand place as singular—that is, "a place"—generations of scholars' work, and millennia of elders' stories teach us otherwise. If we learn to listen, to pay attention, the onion-layering of time and space reveals itself in any place. In this article, I dwell in this garden through its extension in other media, as well as right there on the hot paving stones. I look at curatorial records, internal and institutional correspondence, building plans, meeting minutes, photographs, and anything else that seems to yield productive paths into thinking about what this garden is, has been, and was imagined for. Finding such paths helps me trace the work of tendrils, echoes, and palimpsests on the Land of this place.