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In a recent essay, Françoise Vergès (2019) has argued against the idea that a cleaned and confined environment could guide our way out of the nightmare popularly called Anthropocene. For Vergès, contained cleanliness and ordered vegetalia was central for the calculations of capitalism. Cleaned, “natural” environments were the condition of possibility of a system of extraction that kept the gendered and racialised bodies of the “cleaners” out of sight. Domestic and physical labour was mobilised and displaced as part of a regime of accumulation that relied on a logistics of waste (including disposable and extractive nature and wasted lives) to materialise a universalist logic of value. Waste and nature, contained unruliness and suppressed surplus, come together in Djaimila Pereira de Almeida’s A visão das plantas, which was also published in 2019. The journey of Celestino in the novel echoes the kind of redemption that walled natural spaces offer in Vergès’ apt reconceptualisation of more-than-human regimes of waste and value. Here the image of the so-called “tropical botanical garden” in Lisbon, the place where the novel’s setting, easily comes to mind. The attentiveness with which the former men-of-arms look after the garden space reveals the underside of an anthropocenic pastoral, in which recourse to the land and the flora can be strategically managed to generate a safeguarded postcolonial amnesia. This paper engages with plants and wasted lives in A visão das plantas to make sense of the role of “contained” and “looked after” nature as a platform for colonial governmentality and postcolonial dispossession within and beyond the Portuguese-Speaking world.