Gombe. The forest of my childhood dreams, dim and green under the canopy, chimpanzees feasting on the ripe fruits of the tall Mtobogolo figs. There are so many species of figs at Gombe. Most of them have their own species of wasp living among the ripe fruits. As I wander the forest, learning about the chimpanzees, I marvel at the great diversity of life-forms and the way they are all interconnected. The vines creeping higher and higher around the trees as they strive to reach the sunlight. Sometimes killing their support, but then clothing the dying wood with their own leaves and flowers. Along the streambanks the vegetation is green and lush, with brilliant orange-flowering Acanthaceae and the ever-bright blue flower called Commelina benghalensis that can bloom for days because, under the direct rays of the sun, the blossom is retracted into a bed of jelly-like liquid within the calyx.
The magic days of the first rains. The striped tiger lilies appearing along the forest trail, and the occasional brilliant red of the fireball lily with its spiky tennis-ball flowers. Up on the high ridges there is, suddenly, a fresh blooming of orange-yellow flowers, sitting on flat green circles of leaves that are pressed close to the ground. (One of its names is Kiha, meaning “earth-ears” in Swahili.) And looking down on the forest from above I see the canopy splashed with great patches of brilliant orange-red, the flowers of the Ipomoea mauritiana—a local morning glory vine. Sometimes I find individual blossoms that have fallen to the forest floor, large as the palm of my hand. And there is a little plant called touch me not that keeps its seeds held tight until they are hit by falling rain; then all at once the pods spring open, with a loud cracking sound. It sounds like a forest gnome’s fireworks display. And then, of course, there are the trees. There is not enough space or enough words to write all that I love about the trees of the forest.
Plants Need Our Help, Too
When we think of endangered species, we immediately think of giant pandas, tigers, mountain gorillas, and other such wonders of the animal kingdom. Even, because of much press coverage recently, the amphibians. Seldom do we think of trees and plants in the same category—as living things that we have pushed to the brink of extinction and that desperately need our help if they and the animals are to survive. Of course, we know that tropical and old-growth forests are disappearing at a terrifying rate. The same goes for other types of landscape—woodlands, wetlands, prairies and grasslands, moors and heaths. Indeed, the list is limited only by the types of environment found on Planet Earth. Everywhere the natural world with its rich diversity of living things is under attack from development, agriculture, pollution, exotic species, shrinking water supplies, and now, most terrifying, climate change. Habitat loss is a theme that comes up again and again, diminishing biodiversity and causing local extinctions in place after place.
In fact, even utterly destroyed habitats can, with human ingenuity, time, and political will, be restored. And it is the plants that lead the way, that somehow take root on bare rock or land contaminated with pollutants, then slowly build up the soil, allowing other life-forms to move in. Indigenous cultures knew this long before the discipline of plant ecology was born. They know that all animal species ultimately depend on plant material.
The herbivores eat it directly; the carnivores eat creatures who themselves fed on plants—or, to be picky, they may eat animals who fed on animals who fed on plants. Yet for the most part, the work of the botanists and horticulturalists who battle to save unique plant species from extinction goes unnoticed. I believe it’s crucial to highlight the sometimes extraordinary work that has been and is being done to preserve the rich diversity and sheer beauty of plant life that brightens our planet. I want to acknowledge the contributions of the field botanists who travel to remote places to collect specimens for study or preservation, the dedication of those working in herbariums, the skilled horticulturalists who struggle to germinate the last seeds of the last individual plant of an almost extinct species, the skill and patience of the men and women working in the many Centers for Plant Conservation (CPC) that have been established in so many places around the world. I want to honor these often passionate and dedicated men and women.
The botanical world is full of discoveries, and rediscoveries; if I tried to make an exhaustive collection of all such accounts, I’d end up with a whole book on the subject. Many of the stories here were suggested by my friend Dr. Peter Raven of the Missouri Botanical Gardens. His contacts then referred me to others, and so on. And there were some who wrote offering a story, having heard that I was working on this project. Others I learned about by chance as I chatted to friends, such as Dr. Hugh Bollinger, over dinner.
Kew Botanical Gardens
One and all, the botanists I have spoken with have been generous with their time, and freely shared their information. I recently spent a wonderful morning at Kew Botanical Gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most famous collections in the world. It includes 326 acres of landscaped gardens. Its stunning glasshouses include the Palm House, which was built in 1844 and simulates a multilayered tropical rain forest; it is one of my favorite places. Kew’s sister site is Wakehurst Place in West Sussex, home to the Millennium Seed Bank. This, the largest wild-plant seed bank in the world, holds more than a billion seeds of thousands of species of plants for safekeeping. By 2010, Kew and its partners from around the globe will have collected and conserved seed from 10 percent of the world’s wild flowering plant species. The aim, funds permitting, is to conserve 25 percent by 2020. This is just one of many conservation projects that make the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a world-famous scientific organization, internationally respected for its outstanding living collection of plants and world-class herbarium as well as its scientific expertise in plant diversity and conservation.
Kew’s botanists and horticulturists have been involved in collecting, saving, and returning to the wild many of the species discussed in this section. These scientists include Carlos Magdalena, Nick Johnson, and John Sitch, all of whom I met that morning, all of whom were enormously helpful and generous with their time. Carlos had just flown in from Spain and I had arrived that morning from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and there we were, walking through the gardens. It had been raining, but the sun came out and everything was looking its best—if only there had been time to wander 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 with Carlos, Nick, and John and meet some of the plants I had been writing about—such as the café marron (Ramosmania rodriguesii), St. Helena ebony (Trochetiopsis ebenus), and cabbage tree (Dendroseris litoralis). John, the palm specialist, introduced me to some of the species such as the bottle palm (Hyophorbe lagenicaulis) and hurricane palm (Dictyosperma album) that so nearly became extinct in Round Island. John also showed me, with great excitement, the tahina palm (Tahina spectabilis), a recent discovery from Madagascar.
We had lunch, along with my sister Judy and Claire Quarrendon of JGI-UK, in a quiet corner of the restaurant looking out over a Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis), in its protective cage, that was recently planted by naturalist and BBC broadcaster David Attenborough. It made me wonder how my Wollemi pine was getting on that I’d planted three years before in Adelaide, Australia. Carlos and Nick told so many stories, with so much enthusiasm. We rushed back to take a few photos, and then I made my last visit of the day.
The Herbarium at Kew
Two of the plants that I discuss in this section were, for a while, known only from dried specimens stored in herbariums. Dr. Lourdes Rico-Arce—or Lulu as she likes to be called—welcomed us into her domain—Kew’s historic herbarium. It was the eighteenth-century home of the king of Hanover until his death in 1851, shortly after which the herbarium and library were founded. Herbarium specimens are dried and pressed plants stuck on a sheet of cartridge or other archival-quality paper with a label attached in the bottom right-hand corner giving relevant information about each specimen. Some things, like fruits, are kept separately, and fragile items such as orchids are stored in spirits to keep their shape.
As we went past row after row of cupboards filled with drawer after drawer of specimens, I was transported back to the time I spent in the herbarium at the National Museum in Nairobi where Dr. Bernard Verdcourt would help me to identify, in the early years of my study, the plants on which the chimpanzees at Gombe were feeding. And as we walked through room after room, on three different floors, we passed specimens just brought in from the field, still lying between sheets of newspaper. Vividly I recalled the days when I would take my fresh specimens back to the tent in the evening, then help my mother to place them carefully between sheets of newspaper and press them in wooden frames. Her job was to change the papers and try to keep the specimens as dry and mold-free as possible—no easy task in the humid climate of Gombe.
Kew’s herbarium is vast. Lulu told us that currently more than seven million specimens, representing nearly 98 percent of all of the genera in the world, are stored there. It has the largest collection of historical plant specimens and species from all regions of the world. Stored there, too, are over 350,000 “type specimens.” These are the original specimens, some dating back to the eighteenth century, that typify and fix a species name for all time, and are invaluable to those researching the taxonomy and systematics of plants and fungi. Together they represent a major and irreplaceable international asset. And all these specimens are arranged systematically in cupboards and drawers so that a particular species can be found within minutes.
I left Kew with a renewed appreciation for the amazing complexity and diversity of the Kingdom of the Plants. And for the extraordinary efforts of those who are working tirelessly to keep these sometimes fragile species alive.
