The image of landscape, therefore, is not limited to that space’s surface, but is a densely layered codex of meanings, temporalities, affects, and “states of mind.”

Am I, writing now at a desk, a clerk of flora? Do I go from the plant I see growing to the notes in my notebook, aware that I am passing from one world to another?

As is known, the antecedent of plant trafficking dates back to Cinchona officinalis, whose pharmaceutical properties began to be highly appreciated in Europe after its bark was taken to Italy, the homeland of herbariums, in 1631. To this day, its derivatives make it an eligible drug for the treatment of malaria and a remedy for the fevers with which the tropics charge the entry of the unwary into its domains.

The Cinchona tree cured one fever and ignited another that proved fatal to it.

The Latin term officinalis appears recurrently in the scientific nomenclature I am consulting (...) Etymologies are an opportunity for the manifestation of what lies in the constitution of language, as if something had always been there, waiting to emerge from the fabric of meaning. Linnaeus incorporated into his system the term officinalis in 1735 to connote that the plant had a culinary or medicinal use, something that, being rigorous, leads us to the fact that the word “office” refers to the storehouse of a monastery.

El caucho es hasta ahora un dato, un rumor, una fábula, y no tiene ningún papel en la primera parte de la historia. Aparece la quinina, por supuesto, un derivado de la quina, elemento fundamental en historias donde las fiebres tropicales aquejan a los personajes, pero los individuos vegetales de la selva aún están ausentes. Es como si estos seres fueran solo datos antes de ser presencias.

As for the highly imaginative stories that the Indians learned of the curative properties of the bark of the Fever Tree by observing that ‘fever-ailing mountain lions would chew the bark of a particular tree, which turned out to be the Fever Tree’, or that the Europeans learned of it because ‘a Spanish soldier who, seized with a fit of malaria in a deserted spot, drank from a lake surrounded by trees bearing the Peruvian Bark, into which some of them had fallen and impregnated the water, thus making a natural infusion, then fell asleep and when he awoke the fever was gone’, just because they are so fanciful such colourful legends deserve to survive. It is an established fact, supported by the accounts of the early missionaries and chroniclers, that the Indians were both natural observers and talented botanists, with a wide knowledge of medicinal plants.

Malaria attacked the troops of Alvarado in the pernicious form termed by Krafft-Ebing, malarial delirium, which consists in marked psychic symptoms and terrible excitement.

Nevertheless, such history is still in many a particular rather obscure. What is more,on points which are more or less established facts, or which should have been established facts, one often reads statements which not only contradict each other but are themselves contradicted by the actual, unassailable facts, so that one wonders how these could have passed unchallenged for generations.

And from there arose the fever, like gold fever; the orange cinchona, the red cinchona, revolved in the minds of the fortune hunters. The odyssey began, the consent, the forests began to be violated by the gold-thirsty machetes... The fever ran and the cinchona paradoxically ignited it.

The point is not the role of science in imperial history, but science itself as imperial history.

Travelers and naturalists act as agents of both the state and God, and their discoveries or acts of appropriation, although individually proclaimed, are presented in the name of the King and with a strong religious justification.

It is because of them (plants) and through them that our planet is a cosmogony in action, the constant genesis of our cosmos. Botany, in this sense, should find a hesiodic tone and describe all forms of life capable of photosynthesis as inhuman and material divinities, domestic titans that have no need of violence to found new worlds.

For plants, since the beginning life is defined as a circulation of living beings and, for that reason, it is constituted in the dissemination of forms, in the difference of species, of kingdoms, of ways of life.

The organisation of quinine production can be considered as just another interference by the colonial government roughly resembling other interventions in the Culture System. But the culture of cinchona was the first form of colonial agricultural production in which the government organised, monitored and controlled the cultivation process by means of «experts».