Botanical Dimensions: The Garden McKenna Built

“In 1985, McKenna and his then-wife Kathleen Harrison founded Botanical Dimensions on the Big Island of Hawaii, a living archive of ethnobotanically significant plants, many of them psychoactive.”

Food of the Gods argues that the relationship between humans and psychoactive plants is fundamental, not a curiosity but a constitutive feature of what humans are and have been for most of their evolutionary history. Botanical Dimensions was McKenna's attempt to act on this argument materially.

In 1985, McKenna and his then-wife Kathleen Harrison founded Botanical Dimensions on the Big Island of Hawaii. It was a nonprofit ethnobotanical preserve with a specific mandate: to collect, protect, propagate, and study plants of ethnomedical significance, with an emphasis on the plants that appeared in the psychoactive plant literature Schultes and Hofmann had assembled.

The preserve grew plants that were, in some cases, rarely cultivated outside their native regions. It maintained living specimens of species that were being lost to deforestation and agricultural displacement in their original habitats. It served as a research resource, a conservation site, and a demonstration that the ethnobotanical relationship McKenna described in his writing could be maintained physically as well as conceptually.

Harrison, who remained involved with Botanical Dimensions after the couple's separation, is herself a botanist and ethnobotanist whose work has focused on the cultural contexts of plant medicine use. Her approach, more patient and more careful about cultural appropriation than McKenna's, represents a complementary strand of the same project: the argument that the plants deserve serious attention, sustained relationship, and proper context.

McKenna lived on the Big Island intermittently through the 1990s. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1999 and died on April 3, 2000, in San Rafael, California. Botanical Dimensions continues to operate. The garden he built outlasted the lectures, which is probably what he intended.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Terence McKenna
• Grokipedia, Terence McKenna
• McKenna, Food of the Gods (1992)