Ceremonies of Possession

While working on my Settler Colonialism final paper, I read the first chapter of Patricia Seed's "Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640" and thought it very interesting the way she described particularly British means of taking possession over territory in the New World. Such methods included building houses and fences, but the most surprising one to me was the planting of the garden:

The British style of enacting authority involved gardens, or at least a garden-variety imperialism. The very ordinariness of British acts of possession was notable from the very beginning. Yet despite links to possession, planting retained its remarkably mundane character. In seventeenth-century English, "garden" became a joking substitute for "commonplace." But this ordinariness, its most striking feature, did not sever its connection to colonialism. Gardens of all sorts, even elaborate formal ones, often were connected to their original colonizing function.