The Garden, The River (A Conversation) is a two-channel video featuring public gardens in Panaji and Lisbon, both named after Garcia da Orta, a 16th-century Portuguese Sephardic Jewish physician and Renaissance pioneer of ethnobotany and tropical medicine. Concealing his Jewish roots to escape the Inquisition, da Orta was a multifaceted figure with a plural identity, emblematic of early Iberian globalization and colonial history in South Asia. Living in Goa for over 30 years, he learned from locals, traders, and Muslim doctors, and published his seminal work on Indian plant medicine, Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India, in 1563 in the form of a dialogue. It was the first text to incorporate oriental materia medica into European science. The video re-imagines da Orta’s Renaissance dialogue in a contemporary urban garden, featuring a conversation between da Orta and Ruano, a street trader embodying the spirit of the river and the sea. Their exchange points to the enduring relevance of da Orta’s work, emphasizing curiosity, respect, and cross-cultural knowledge exchange, and underscoring the need to revise the grand narratives and decentralize modern science, as part of a necessary intercultural and translocal enterprise. The principles of diversity of knowledge, translation, interculturality and translation championed by da Orta in the 16th century resonate with today’s challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change which cannot be faced by any one nation alone and which highlight the urgency of remembering ancient wisdom about the natural world and our co-existence with it.