Seeds of Hope
Page 10
And then, into the picture, comes Sir Hans Sloane, a doctor who was not only interested in the healing powers of plants but also extremely well connected—and extremely wealthy. He wanted to ensure the success of the physic garden and so bought the property in 1712 and appointed eminently qualified men to take over the running of the place—Isaac Rand as director and Philip Miller as gardener. Miller was a genius at growing the plants, and the enthusiastic Rand began cataloging their collection and also initiated the exchange of plants and seeds with other botanical establishments. Soon it was the most richly stocked garden in Europe.
I thought of the history of the place as a few of my friends and I looked around on a chilly day not long ago. It was 340 years since the Garden began, 289 years since Sir Hans instilled new energy into it. Dawn Kemp, the general manager, took us into the cataloged library collection and pointed out, with real anguish, that these priceless books are housed above the kitchen. She lives in fear of a fire breaking out.
With reverent hands, she pulled out one volume after another—handwritten and bound—from shelves and cupboards. One such was a very large book on ferns published in 1855 by Thomas Moore when he was curator. It is an amazing book, each fern illustrated with the new (at the time) “Nature Printing” technique, which used the actual plant in the process. Moore’s fascination with ferns started the British love affair with them, which unfortunately led to a significant plundering of British species by enthusiasts. It was during this time that glass ferneries sprang up—and became an essential part of an upper-class Victorian sitting room.
As we walked around the garden, we kept coming upon educational displays hidden away among the trees, where I found photos and information about some of the colorful people I had come to know during my research for this book. Linnaeus himself, I learned, had visited several times, hoping to persuade Rand and Miller to accept his new classification of plants. They resisted initially, but finally capitulated after they realized how much simpler it would make things.
Just as one example, a well-loved magnolia—originally sent to England by one of our plant hunters, John Bartram—was named by Linnaeus Magnolia grandiflora. Before his classifications were accepted, this poor plant was known as Magnolia foliis lanceolatisi persistentibus, caul erecto arborea (Tree with an erect trunk and evergreen leaves). Those wretched apprentice apothecaries, having to learn names like that—how delighted they must have been when things changed!
While wandering through the garden we found one section where the plants and herbs were organized according to their healing properties. Many plant remedies have come to us from ancient folk wisdom, passed down through the ages, and I imagined Sir Hans eagerly trying some of them out on his patients. There are two displays: the Pharmaceutical Garden, showing plants used in modern medicine, and the Garden of World Medicine, where there are plants used in European folk medicine and plants used by indigenous people in Australia, North America, and South Africa.
In the center of the garden is a large and famous mulberry tree, and Dawn told me that one day she had found an old man sitting on a seat under its branches. He told her he was remembering how, as a young boy ninety years ago, he used to gather fruits from that tree and take them to his mother so that she could make mulberry jam.
I looked back at it as I left: we could read the history of the place on the plaques and the old books, but that old tree had seen it all and was part of the history. Linnaeus may well have sat in its shade, perhaps arguing with Rand about the naming of the plants. And maybe it was when he was sitting under this tree, looking up at the leaves against the sky, that Rand suddenly realized the beautiful simplicity and appropriateness of Linnaeus’s system. Only the tree knows.
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a mecca for plant biologists and plant lovers from all over the world. It was brought to renown by the influential Sir Joseph Banks and, subsequently, by the equally influential Sir Joseph Hooker. Kew’s botanists and horticulturists have been involved for hundreds of years in collecting, cultivating, and propagating plants from all over the world. In more recent times Kew’s staff have been working to conserve natural habitats and to return some endangered species to the wild.
A couple of years ago I spent a wonderful morning there. It had been raining, but the sun came out and everything was looking its best—if only there had been time to wander about through at least some of the 120 hectares (300 acres) of gardens and take in the energy from some of the ancient trees. But I was there to go behind the scenes into the tropical propagation greenhouses and meet some of the plants I was writing about.
First there was time to catch up, over a quick lunch, with my good friend Carlos Magdalena, Kew’s master horticulturist, who was taking me around. From the first time I met him, I was inspired by his passion, his contagious love for his plants. With his shoulder-length dark hair, piercing brown eyes, and ready smile, he is a perfect spokesperson for the plants of the world. He had just returned from a collecting trip to Mauritius, and poured out the news, sometimes hard to understand because he talks so fast in his thick Spanish accent.
Carlos Magdalena, Kew’s horticulturist, is an inspiration to me. I feel immense gratitude toward all the dedicated botanists such as Carlos, who travel to remote and far-off locations and sometimes even risk their lives to rescue endangered plants. They possess all the courage and passion of the early plant hunters. (CREDIT: © THE JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE–UK / BY CLAIRE QUARENDON)
Somehow he had got caught up in the frenzy of Mauritius’s election day—and just after he arrived, he was told he would have to leave. He had just twenty-four hours to collect some of the specimens he wanted, and he set off to the area where Kew has a project, driving at breakneck speed.
There are so many species in danger of extinction, he said, some with just one or two individuals left in the wild. With so little time, how to choose? He got what he could “all collected in a rush… then flight back to UK. Then sort the hundreds of twigs, saplings, seeds, whatever. Flamed fruits in a sterile jar.” He hurriedly spoke about “dustlike orchids’ seeds that are unripe, and I have to go to a lab and inoculate in agar-agar…”
I have no idea how you “flame” a fruit, nor how or why you inoculate seeds with agar-agar. It is all part of the incredibly complex world of the master horticulturist.
Next we paid our respects to Kew’s Wollemi pine, growing inside its protective cage. These ancient trees from Australia, which I mentioned earlier, are now being cultivated and sold to botanical gardens and gardeners around the world. I saw another of them when I was visiting Lord Eden, who lives not far from Bournemouth. And a few years ago I actually planted one at a special ceremony in the beautiful gardens of Adelaide Zoo in Australia. I hear it is growing nicely.
Then Carlos took me to the Palm House, which has been designed to give the impression of a multilayered rain forest. This enormous, architecturally stunning glass-and-iron structure is one of Kew’s iconic images and one of the most popular destinations for visitors. It is filled with warm, steamy air and massive exotic palms from the far corners of the world, many of which, like the bottle palm, are almost extinct in the wild.
I met this towering Eastern Cape giant cycad, Encephalartos altensteinii, in the Palm House at Kew. It is almost certainly the oldest potted plant in existence—the very same individual that was somehow transported all the way from South Africa to London in 1770 by the plant hunter Francis Masson. (CREDIT: © COPYRIGHT THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW)
My biggest thrill was meeting Kew’s venerable cycad, Encephalartos altensteinii, or the Eastern Cape giant cycad. I gazed at it in awe, for it was collected in 1775 by Francis Masson and is one of the oldest—possibly the oldest—potted plant in the world. I learned that it had been repotted in 2009—a mammoth operation, since the cycad, which has been growing about an inch a year, now weighs slightly over one ton.
The Herbarium
The big botanical gardens all have an herbarium to house collections of plants that have been preserved for scientific study. They are used to study plant taxonomy and geographic distribution, and they provide a historical record of change in vegetation over time. When a plant becomes extinct in a given area—or totally extinct—the only record of its original distribution may be in an herbarium collection. Scientists also use herbarium collections to track changes in plant distribution caused by climate changes and human impacts.
The historic Herbarium at Kew was established in the middle of the 1800s and houses many of the specimens that were collected by the amazing plant hunters of yore. One of the Herbarium’s experts is Dr. María de Lourdes Rico Arce—or Lulú, as she likes to be called. She led me past row after row of cupboards filled with drawer after drawer of specimens. Each specimen had been dried and pressed, then stuck on a sheet of archival-quality paper with a label attached describing where the plant had been found, when collected, and by whom. Big fruits or seeds, as well as fragile flowers, roots, inflorescences, and many orchids, are stored in spirits so as to keep their shape for three-dimensional viewing.
As I followed Lulú through the maze of back rooms, we passed plants just brought in from the field, still lying between sheets of newspaper. How well I remember those days in 1960 when my mother and I prepared specimens of plants used by the chimpanzees for food so that they could be identified by Dr. Bernard Verdcourt, the botanist at the herbarium of the Coryndon Museum (now the National Museums of Kenya).
I collected the plant specimens in the forest and took them back to the tent in the evening. There my mother and I would place them carefully between sheets of newspaper flanked by thick absorbent paper, and then we’d press them in specially designed wooden frames so plants could still get air for drying, and finish by pulling straps tight to flatten the unruly leaves.
My mother’s job, for the few months she was with me at the start of the study, was to change the papers and try to keep the specimens as dry and mold-free as possible—not easy when the rainy season began. We rigged up a sort of drying rack above a hurricane lamp—but even so, Bernard was horrified by the number of moldy specimens that so often arrived in his herbarium. I wonder if they are still tucked away in a drawer there.
For a moment I was far away, reliving the events of a different time, but Lulú brought me back to the present. There were, she told me, over 7 million specimens stored in the Kew Herbarium. And there are 350,000 “type specimens.” A type specimen is very important for botanists, especially taxonomists, because the scientific name of every species is based on that one specimen. They are used to identify material as it is brought in from the field.
If, after an exhaustive search, it seems that a new species has been found, one of the plants from that material will be picked as the type specimen. The plant will be described, named, and published. That name is then recorded for all time.
Most of the type specimens at Kew are original material brought from the field. Just occasionally a very detailed colored drawing or a photograph serves as a type specimen. In the early days it was almost impossible to transport some specimens, and today a plant may be so highly endangered that no material can legally be collected.
Kew’s collection forms an irreplaceable international scientific asset, which is surely very valuable to the historian also. Some of the specimens in Kew’s collection date back to the eighteenth century, brought or sent from the field by some of those intrepid plant hunters who worked for Sir Joseph Banks and Sir Joseph Hooker. What a magical link to the past—leaves and flowers pressed flat that were collected by David Nelson, then traveled with him on a sailing ship commanded by no less a person than the famous Captain Cook. Others picked by the dour Scotsman David Douglas, who survived hair-raising adventures. One pressed plant had been, perhaps, with Francis Masson when he hid all night from that gang of convicts in Africa. I was miles away again, dreaming of those wild journeys of a bygone era.
Lulú introduced me to some of the modern-day botanists and conservationists who are now working in the Herbarium. The challenges they face are different from those experienced by the plant hunters of days gone by—these contemporary scientists are mostly frustrated by irritating international bureaucracies as they seek permits to send their specimens, or themselves, from one country to another. But they do face physical danger too—there is violent political unrest in so many of the places where they work, as well as the risk of mugging and traffic accidents on treacherous back roads and the increasing violence in many urban areas.
Even so, in the face of the growing number of plants threatened with extinction, more and more herbariums are beginning to work on conservation issues in the field. Together they play a vital role in helping to identify and preserve the rich diversity of the plant life on Planet Earth.
Chapter 7
Seeds
The miraculous seeds of life. Like every plant, each seed is highly unique and intriguing. These orange-and-black seeds remind me of pharmaceutical capsules, but they are really the beginnings of the Afzelia africana tree. (CREDIT: WOLFGANG STUPPY; © COPYRIGHT THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW)
Seeds have a kind of magic that has fascinated me ever since I was a child. I used to line a glass jam jar with blotting paper, fill it with damp earth or sawdust, and put different kinds of seeds between paper and glass. For me, it was nothing short of a miracle every time I saw those threadlike roots appear and grow downward, and the little shoot bursting through the seed coat and thrusting up toward the light. I loved to look at all the bright-colored pictures of flowers and vegetables on packets of seeds in gardening shops—all the things one could grow if only the soil was right!
Our garden, as I have said, was not a good home for many plants, but I was always hopeful. I sowed the seeds I had chosen in shallow wooden boxes and watched the little shoots push up from the soil, the husks of the seed coats clinging to the curled-up infant leaves like tiny bonnets. Then I carefully thinned the seedlings out and planted them in a flowerbed with great hope and expectation, despite the fact that, year after year, the poor young things were devoured by snails or slugs, or had their roots chewed up by wireworms. Very few ever survived, and eventually I gave up.
I got close to seeds again at Gombe when, in the early days of the chimpanzee study, I would carefully extract them from samples of chimpanzee dung to check on what the elusive apes had been eating. That, of course, is the method chosen by many plants to disperse their seeds—by surrounding them with delicious fruit and thus persuading a variety of animals to transport them, in stomach and gut, throughout their home range.
To provide protection for the precious germ of life within, the seed case is often very tough and hard. But while this helps to protect against chewing teeth, it also makes germination difficult and, as I said earlier, some seeds actually rely on the digestive juices of particular fruit-eating creatures to partly dissolve their protective covering. Only then can the little dormant speck of life inside thrust forth into a world of light. There are other seeds that need fire before they can germinate, and others the abrasive effect of wind and sand.
Indeed, the more I learn about seeds, the more fascinated I become. Recently Wolfgang Stuppy, seed morphologist for Kew, presented me with his marvelous book—Seeds: Time Capsules of Life. Some of them, when seen through a scanning electron microscope, have the most bizarre and sometimes stunningly beautiful appearance. Browsing through the pages of this book is a bit like an adventure in a fantasy world, a whole new experience of design and color.
Rip Van Winkle Seeds
Is it not amazing that a small germ of life can be kept alive—sometimes for hundreds of years—inside a p
rotective case, where it waits, patiently, for the right conditions to germinate? Is it not stretching the imagination when we are told of a seed that germinated after a two-thousand-year sleep? Yet this is what has happened.
Four of the original date palm seeds found by archaeologists in King Herod’s mountain fortress. Carbon dating showed they were two thousand years old—yet one of them germinated! (CREDIT: GUY EISNER)
The story begins with several seeds, subsequently identified as the Judean date palm (Phoenix dactylifera), that were found by archaeologists studying the ruins of King Herod’s fortress, Masada, on the shores of the Dead Sea. Small fragments of the seed case of two of these date seeds were used for radiocarbon dating. The other three were planted—and one grew. Its parent was long since dead, along with the palm forests that, at the time, were found throughout the Jordan Valley.
Those palms, forty-foot-tall ancestors of the modern date palm, were believed to have medicinal value, but they were also grown for their delicious—and very large—fruits. As I read the story, I wondered about the people who had eaten the fruit surrounding those seeds.
And that thought set me thinking—all the life and energy, hopes and fears, courage and cruelty of the people who once lived and died in that place are gone. Long since dead and gone forever. Only the crumbling ruins of the castle are left in the desert. Yet within a two-thousand-year-old seed, a germ of life was still alive, waiting, waiting, waiting for the right conditions to wake, like Rip Van Winkle, into a strange and different world. And then it put forth roots and shoot and grew into a seedling, which was named “Methuselah” after the biblical character, Noah’s grandfather, who was said to have lived for 969 years. (Of course this could not be true; someone must have calculated the date wrong, but he was obviously a very old man!) An individual date palm is either male or female, so they had to wait for their plant to mature in order to find out the sex—if it’s a female, I was told, it would be called “Mrs. Methuselah.”