by Jane Goodall
David and the Belgian botanists then contacted their conservation partner, the Millennium Seed Bank, so that the precious seeds could be grown in two separate locations, by two different teams. They were, it seems, only just in time, as only a few seeds were still alive. However, these grew successfully and produced viable seeds, some of which are now safely stored in the Millennium Seed Bank, as well as in Belgium.
And what of the British interrupted brome? It, too, has been saved, though its history is less dramatic. Some of the grasses were located growing in pots on the windowsill of a brome-loving botanist. He was able to hand out seeds to other scientists, and the future of Bromus interruptus is at last assured.
The future for both the bromes is now hopeful, and plans for their reintroduction into the countryside are being made under the auspices of the European Native Seed Conservation Network. This is a collaboration recently formed between the Millennium Seed Bank and thirty-one other botanical institutes for the protection of endangered plants. It marks an important step toward the preservation of Europe’s botanical biodiversity. And I like to think that my great-grandchildren may lie, as I once did, in fields where skylarks and poppies make a summer afternoon beautiful, and where some of the little bromes once more sway in the breeze.
When I was searching for information about the brome of the Ardennes, I remember coming across a French quote that I thought could be equally applied to both of these grasses: “a bearer of hope for the vegetative world.”
Indeed, it is from such stories that I derive the strength to go on fighting for Mother Nature.
Storing Seeds around the Globe
The Millennium Seed Bank is just one among some 1,400 seed banks around the world, although it is the largest one focusing on wild plants. Seed banks often work in collaboration with a botanical garden or a university, have partnerships with other seed banks within the country, and in many cases also with the Millennium Seed Bank. Everywhere, the process of collection, cleaning, drying, and storage is more or less the same, though finances may dictate the degree of sophistication possible.
One of the world’s first global seed banks was started in 1920 by a most extraordinary Russian scientist, Nikolai Vavilov. Between 1920 and 1940 he went on one hundred collecting expeditions, searching for both wild and cultivated plants throughout five continents. These ventures took him to locations as diverse as Iran, the United States, South and Central America, the Mediterranean, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. And he accumulated the seeds of around two hundred thousand crops and wild plants, particularly those of food crops and fruit trees.
Unfortunately, Stalin’s Communist regime believed that the science of genetics supported the notion of “inborn class differences” among people, and Vavilov, one of the great scientists of the twentieth century, was proclaimed an “enemy of the people” and was thrown into prison in 1940. The seed bank, which mostly consisted of living trees and agricultural plants, would have been destroyed but for the heroic efforts of a few loyal botanists who struggled to save it. In 1943, Vavilov died in prison at the age of sixty-three. I just hope he knew his life’s work had been saved, for the seed bank survived the Communist era, and was eventually named in Vavilov’s honor.
But today a new threat to the Vavilov Institute is posed by developers who want to use one of its farms to build a housing estate. There has been international condemnation of this plan, partly because it would desecrate the efforts of an extraordinary man but also because of the proven value of this and other seed banks.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is the most remarkable seed bank collection of modern times, is housed in a series of manmade vaults dug into the side of a mountain on a remote island located in the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago.
This “Frozen Garden of Eden” was created in order to secure a duplicate of every country’s food-seed collection in a safe, natural deep freeze, so that even if the electricity fails, the thick rock and permafrost will ensure that the seeds remain frozen, since the temperature in the vault would only rise to the level of the surrounding permafrost, about minus 3.5 degrees centigrade (25.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The vault rooms are designed to remain frozen for up to two hundred years, even taking into account the most drastic predictions of global warming.
In Celebration of Seeds
Every time I explain to an audience the symbolism that led to naming our youth program “Roots & Shoots,” I describe the magic, the life force within a seed that is so powerful that tiny roots, in order to reach the water, can work their way through rocks, and the tiny shoot, in order to reach the sun, can find a way through crevices in a brick wall. And, in the end, the rocks and the walls—symbolizing all the harm we have inflicted on the planet—will be pushed aside and cast down.
This power is illustrated all around us—even in the middle of a city, seeds that have ended up in cracks between the paving stones will push out that tentative shoot, and down below, the roots move slowly, unseen beneath the concrete. Roots & Shoots—the strength of the youth of the world.
Knowing I was going to Shanghai during my 2010 lecture tour in China, and knowing I was writing a book about plants, several people told me to be sure to visit the UK pavilion at the World Expo 2010. They told me that the British designer Thomas Heatherwick and his team had got together with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Millennium Seed Bank to plan the structure and that it was “awesome.”
By the time I got to Shanghai, it was definitely a favorite among the crowds visiting the more than seventy pavilions that were built for the expo. The Chinese in particular loved it, and nicknamed it “Pu Gong Ying”—“The Dandelion.” It was made of sixty thousand slender, transparent, fiber-optic rods, each one almost twenty-five feet long. And implanted in the tip of each of the rods was one or more seeds, provided by the Kunming Institute of Botany. I still regret that my packed schedule did not allow me to see the interior of this magical place, described by Heatherwick as “a tranquil, contemplative space, surrounded by the tens of thousands of points of light.” In the daytime the rods acted as optic fibers, drawing daylight in to illuminate the interior. And illuminating the seeds.
But at least I got to see it. And despite all I had read about it and all I had been told, nothing had prepared me for the fantastic sight of “The Seed Cathedral.” It was nighttime, and from a distance it seemed unreal, ethereal, rising to a height of sixty-five feet above the ground. Light sources inside each of the rods caused the whole structure to shine with an eerie, almost phosphorescent, glow and in the gentle breeze they swayed, a host of giant translucent stems rippling over the exterior of the pavilion.
It was a fitting tribute to the magic power of seeds.
Chapter 8
Orchids
When I look at this orchid, I feel a sense of awe. So beautiful, and with my name attached: Spathoglottis Jane Goodall. I love to see it growing in the Singapore Botanic Garden among all the other glorious flowers. (CREDIT: BENG CHIAK TAN)
With their fantastic designs, colors, and sizes, orchids have bewitched us from earliest times. People have lost their lives searching for them in wild and remote parts of the world. Whole industries have grown up around propagating, hybridizing, and selling them. Countless books have been written about them, many illustrated lavishly with superb photographs and paintings. In one of these, About Orchids, A Chat, published at the end of the nineteenth century, one Frederick Boyle wrote, “the majority of people, even among those who love their garden, regard them as fantastic and mysterious creations, designed, to all seeming, for the greater glory of pedants and millionaires.”
Designer flowers, by God, for the elite! But although we can smile—or sneer—at Boyle’s supreme arrogance, I have to admit that I always felt there was something artificial and opulent about orchids. Those that I knew when growing up were hothouse orchids. I only saw them in the houses of the wealthy—the kinds of orchids that are, today, an essential part of the decor (sitting rooms and—the indigni
ty of it—bathrooms) in all upmarket hotels.
In the warm tropical air of the National Orchid Garden in the Singapore Botanic Gardens, countless species grow in a more natural setting. I walked around among the trees and rocks where they grow, and in the late-afternoon sun they had an almost mystical beauty. There was one small grove where every orchid had a delicate fragrance. Nearby was an area where hybrid orchids grow, each developed to honor a particular individual. How wonderful to see the orchid named for me—Spathoglottis Jane Goodall. Most of the others have been named for members of royal families, presidents, ministers, well-known movie stars, and so on. And now me!
Once I started thinking about these fascinating plants, I decided they needed their own chapter. They make up 8 to 10 percent of all plants. They grow wild in almost every country, colonizing just about every ecological niche—in fact, they are only absent from true desert and frozen ice fields.
I have always thought of orchids as tropical plants and was amazed to discover that about thirteen species are found north of the Arctic Circle—more than in Hawaii, where there are only three! Some orchids are terrestrial, although most grow on rocks or up in trees. A species of orchid is often quite restricted in its range, with many being found on one mountaintop only or in one small forest.
With a height of only one-tenth of an inch, Bulbophyllum minutissimum is considered the smallest orchid on the planet. By contrast, the vanillas have vines reported to reach higher than sixty-five feet, making them the tallest of all the orchids. In some species of vanilla the leaves have almost vanished, appearing like little scales on the green stem. And the tiny and rare British ghost orchid (Epipogium aphyllum) has no leaves at all, and its food is manufactured by fungus on its roots. It spends most of its life underground, and only emerges on a small pale stem to flower, in the darkest part of the wood, when conditions are just right.
Another little orchid, Bulbophyllum nocturnum, discovered by Dutch botanist Ed de Vogel in 2008, on the Island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, is the first true night-blooming species known. Its flowers open at ten p.m. and close at dawn—and they bloom only once. My Dutch botanist friend Rogier van Vugt, from Leiden University, tells me their scent is similar to blue-veined cheese and probably attracts fungus gnats. Only one individual was found—on a logged tree. It was the last known specimen in the world and it may well be extinct in the wild, as most of the area has now been logged. Fortunately Rogier managed to self-pollinate the specimen and obtained seeds so that the plant “now has numerous seedlings and is no longer alone.”
Orchids are usually pollinated by insects, and for most only one particular species of insect can do the job. Typically one of an orchid’s petals is shaped to serve as a “landing pad” for the desired pollinator. The visitor is attracted in several ways—the most successful species (those that produce the most seedpods) offer nectar as a reward.
And then there are the cheats. Their flowers mimic, for example, the female of their specific insect pollinator: when the male tries to mate with this fake female, he unknowingly enhances the orchid’s reproductive success—but not his own! The best known of these cheats is the bee orchid—the flower looks and feels like a female bee and even has the same pheromones. I hope, for the bee’s sake, that he has an enjoyable, though futile, experience.
This extraordinary and fascinating behavior naturally intrigued Charles Darwin, who wrote in a letter to Sir Joseph Hooker of Kew, “I was never more interested in any subject in my life, than in this of orchids.” He published a book in 1877 called The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects.
Once fertilization has been achieved, the orchid produces an incredible number of seeds—as many as four million. I wonder who had the job of counting them!
All in all, we can agree that orchids have a fascinating sex life.
Prince of Orchid Hunters
Many people have developed an almost obsessive fascination for orchids, so it is hardly surprising that a number of the dedicated, crazy plant hunters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries set off on expeditions into unmapped, unhealthy, and often dangerous tropical climes in search of new species. The jungles of Central and South America yielded particularly exotic blooms.
The orchid frenzy that seized Europe, though not quite as extreme as the earlier tulip frenzy, nevertheless saw collections and individual plants auctioned off for enormous prices. The plant hunters competed with one another, and jealously kept secret new sources of especially exotic species—even going to the extent of providing others with false maps. Many of these men accomplished extraordinary feats of endurance—and a number died. One of them searched the whole length of the Amazon River from source to ocean, and in addition crossed the Andes numerous times, climbing to heights of up to nineteen thousand feet. Another hunter traveled the same river the other way around, from sea to source.
One man stands out—the Czech Benedikt Roezl, who has been referred to as the Prince of Orchid Hunters. He had a flair for discovering new and rare species—not only of orchids, incidentally, but of many other beautiful flowers as well—in Latin America and other parts of the world. On one occasion, in 1871, after an unsuccessful trip, he was traveling back by canoe with one native helper. The river was swollen with recent floodwater and was flowing fast. All manner of debris was being swept along, surely posing some danger to their fragile craft. Suddenly Roezl saw that a large uprooted tree that was about to pass them was festooned with many kinds of epiphytes, ferns, and mosses. Quickly paddling toward it, they tied their canoe alongside and gathered up the unexpected and amazingly rich bounty of plant life.
Roezl, unlike many of the orchid hunters who perished of disease, wild animals, natives, bandits, or accidents of travel, survived to die peacefully in his own home back in Prague. This is not to say that he did not have his fair share of adventure—he was, for example, robbed seventeen times. Unlike others of his time, he traveled light, in the manner of many of the famous plant hunters of the previous century. And it was this fact that, on one occasion, almost led to his death, for the Mexican bandits who had captured him were angry that he had so little to steal and they had their knives out ready to kill him. He was only saved, at the last minute, when one of their number pointed out that it was unlucky to kill a madman, and clearly this man who traveled with little but stacks of “weeds” must be crazy. They put away their knives and allowed him to carry on with his journey.
Stolen for Beauty
“For when a man falls in love with orchids,” writes Norman MacDonald in The Orchid Hunters: A Jungle Adventure, “he’ll do anything to possess the one he wants. It’s like chasing a green-eyed woman or taking cocaine, it’s a sort of madness.”
This madness, this desperate quest by so many people for more and yet more new and exotic orchids, unfortunately led to the felling of thousands of forest trees for the epiphytic orchids that grew on them. And because so many of those species are highly endemic, with all individuals of one species being found in a tiny area, the felling of even one of their habitat trees may compromise the gene pool of the whole population. In extreme cases every individual orchid has been removed from its habitat.
Tragically the same greed continues today. Even though in most countries it is illegal to collect orchids without a license that limits the applicant to a strict quota, thousands of plants are collected illegally. Often this is so that new hybrids can be created, propagated, and sold. Dealing in orchids is the most lucrative flower business worldwide, involving some $44 billion per year in legal business, in addition to what is garnered through illegal dealings.
Nothing illustrates the madness that seizes orchid people more than the series of events that followed the discovery, in 2002, of Phragmipedium kovachii. It is a stunningly beautiful orchid from the Amazon rain forest in northeast Peru, with a blue-purple flower that can have a horizontal spread of up to nine and a half inches. This discovery led to a series of international scandals and intrigues
that inspired Craig Pittman’s recently published book The Scent of Scandal: Greed, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Beautiful Orchid.
The story began when Michael Kovach, an American orchid collector, stopped at a roadside kiosk in Peru that sold orchids. The vendor, Faustino Medina Bautista, offered him three fantastic orchids. Kovach had never seen anything like them and was sure they were a new species—perhaps his dream would come true and he would get an orchid named for him.
He flew with one of the plants, concealed among other less exotic specimens, to the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida, famous for its collection of more than six thousand living orchids. When he walked in with his glorious bloom, there was a gasp of astonishment.
Kovach, of course, should have had an export permit. But this could only have been issued if the orchid was being cultivated in Peru, and it would have needed a name—which can only be given when a detailed description has been published. Therefore, it is not easy, legally, to take a new species from its country of origin.
Unfortunately for the Selby Botanical Gardens, there were others who already knew about Kovach’s orchid, since vendor Bautista had been selling them (for less than a dollar apiece) before Kovach turned up there. And a former Selby employee and local orchid taxonomist, Eric Christenson, had obtained a photo from Peruvian scientists, and was working to describe it himself. He planned to name it P. peruvianum in honor of its homeland. When Selby’s taxonomists heard about this rival effort, they started working around the clock, and managed to get their description published in their own scientific journal just five days ahead of Christenson’s.