| Sumario: | This article argues that James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane (1764) makes botanical management—the selection, transplantation, and regulation of plants—its central technology for naturalizing plantation "health." Reading the poem's transplanted remedies, its sugarcane monoculture, and its footnotes' natural history together, I show how vegetal life is made to stand as evidence that imperial environmental transformation is both humane and medically necessary, even as the poem's own plant logic repeatedly discloses the coercion and death that underwrite that well -- being. I develop the term biocolonial poetics to name this aesthetic and discursive strategy, in which a rhetoric of cure consolidates control by treating the plantation as an ecosystem to be optimized. Although terms such as ecology and environmental transformation postdate Grainger, I use them as critical heuristics for tracing how the poem conceptualizes relations among people, plants, climate, and land. Attending to the poem's plants clarifies where its georgic order chafes against the violence it must manage—and what its careful botanical attention cannot finally contain.
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