Queer Ecologies: Ballast Plants in the New World

Abstract

During the second half of the nineteenth century, plant surveys of ballast grounds were executed in earnest at the commercial waterfront territories of Philadelphia and New York City. Botanists, led by Aubrey H. Smith of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and Addison Brown of the Torrey Botanical Club, identified sites of reclaimed land formed by the deposition of merchant ships’ stone, sand, and gravel ballast as well as other debris. Colonies of plants emerged from these ballast lands, often from seeds that had inadvertently been transported by commercial ships. Dubbed “adventive flora” by the botanists and hailing from Great Britain, Europe, South America, and the West Indies, the ballast plant species were identified and tracked over a series of years to determine their success in their new environment. The botanists championed the novelty of the ballast plants, but by the late nineteenth century, federal legislation controlling the entry of plants into the United States was enacted. Interestingly, immigration reform acts also surged at this time, ostensibly to prevent disease transmission but also “racial taint.” The arguments legislating plants and defining “noxious weeds” were uncannily similar. However, the opportunistic adaptability of these ballast plants as well as their genetic diversity provides them with the very characteristics necessary to thrive in a changing climate.