Camila Medina Novoa
2026
Full interview
Camila Medina Novoa is a landscape historian and researcher, whose work sits at the intersection of history of landscape architecture, environmental history, history of science, and the emerging field of Plant Humanities — which places plant species at the centre of historical and cultural inquiry, allowing scientific and humanistic disciplines to inform one another. Co-founder of lofscapes, a Chilean collective dedicated to expanding public discourse on landscape, Medina Novoa is interested in transatlantic narratives and the ecological and cultural co-production of landscapes. Her doctoral research from ETH Zürich follows a single tree species, Araucaria araucana, from its native forests in southern Chile and Argentina into the ornamental gardens of Georgian and Victorian Britain. In tracing that journey, she unfolds the wider social, ecological, and cultural entanglements that shaped how nature was seen, classified, transplanted, and designed with — tracing how scientific enquiries reshaped views of nature and, through them, landscapes. She is currently developing her dissertation, Making Ornamental Trees, into a book.
The discussion openings draw from and partly summarise articles Medina Novoa shared: A Hardy Species: A Perspective on Climate from Araucaria araucana Cultivation in 19th-Century British Gardens, published in Earth Sciences History 45, no. 1 (2026), A Tree in a Pot in a Party, and ‘Civilized’ Pleasures in the Peruvian Amazon Circa 1830, and are accompanied by archival images, sourced by Camila.
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