Introduction

The British colonial official and town-planning expert Eric Dutton (1937: 43) once wrote that “it can be truly said of Africa, trees hide a multitude of sins.” Dutton wrote this in The planting of trees and shrubs, a manual for the work he had undertaken from 1932 to 1936 to implement the plan creating Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia's new capital, as a garden city for Africa. After Dutton's work on the tree and shrub planting for Lusaka as part of his shaping that garden city (which the colonialist writer Elspeth Huxley [1983] called his “brainchild”), Dutton (1983: 133) spoke of the pride he felt in seeing the trees he had planted upon returning to Lusaka in later years: “There was something spellbinding” about visiting “those youngsters from various parts of the world struggling to accustom themselves to the rigours of the high veld.” This sentiment fits very well with cultural analysis of animated elite English relationships with trees, wherein even scholars are apparently “drawn to their aesthetic beauty and their shadowy meaningfulness” (Jones and Cloke, 2002: 2). However, what does this archaic, exotic arboriculture mean to Zambians now—does it have anything like that “shadowy meaningfulness” for Lusakans? What are Zambian residents’ views of the trees in the original garden city's main segment? What trees do Zambians over a broad cross-section of the city plant, and why? What does the whole colonial idea of a garden city mean for contemporary Lusaka's environment?

These specific questions about Lusaka are linked to similar questions in many cities of the continent about their comparative indigenous and exotic biogeographies and environments, about the meanings of the past environments for the present-day cities. Scholars are only really beginning to ask these questions about the contemporary social meanings of urban environmental histories and produced natures across the continent (Shackleton et al, 2015). Although there are some exceptions (Sheldon, 1996; Coquery-Vidrovitch, 2005; Freund, 2007), most African urban historical studies have paid fairly limited attention to environmental dynamics.