Tag Archives: rare plants

Postcard from Borneo #7: Of the rarest plant of all

29 Monday Mar 2010

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In case you were wondering: yes, we did see one.

Rafflesia keithii (I think): one of the 17 known species of this parasitic flower which appears, without leaves or stems, from the roots of the liana vine. This is something of a holy grail for enthusiastic plant-hunters: so I’m feeling very, very privileged.

This was the only one flowering in Sabah, around the area of Poring Springs near Mt Kinabalu where there’s one of the highest concentrations of these extremely rare plants: private garden owners make rich pickings when the flowers appear, but since it’s not possible to transplant them or grow them from seed you have to be very, very lucky to have one appear in your garden. A bit like winning the botanical lottery.

They stink. There’s no way of getting around it: Capt WE Johns, in his eminent tome ‘Biggles in Borneo’, refers to it as smelling of ‘death and corruption’. Exactly so. Just think forgotten packet of mince left in the back of the fridge for a month or so.

It’s pollinated by flies, of course: nothing with such a foul smell could be anything else.

The flowers start as swellings appearing like toadstools from the ground. It can take one of these swellings between 9 and 12 months to reach flowering stage (and not all of them get there): and then the flower lasts one week before it dies.

Did you ever see anything so redolent of putrefaction in your life?

Seeding the world #2

19 Thursday Mar 2009

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What surprised me on my behind-the-scenes tour of the Millennium Seedbank at Wakehurst Place was just how many plants there are in there.

There are a lot of sidelines to the Seedbank’s work, all of which seem to have just grown (excuse the pun) from their original premise of saving seed from every plant in the world.

Now they not only collect rare seed: they germinate it (sometimes in very complicated ways) and grow it on to re-patriate it. These are seriously rare plants – six are entirely extinct in the wild – and it’s not long before you’re looking at a lot of seedlings of plants you’ve never even heard of before.

Nearly all these plants have a story to tell. Here’s a cracker: this is a Leucospermum from South Africa, but not just any leucospermum.

You might remember reading about it in 2006 when it was found, tucked into a notebook owned by Dutch merchant Jan Teerlink and left, forgotten, in the National Archives at Kew. They’d been there for over 100 years. Yet despite their hair-raising journey – the ship they were on was captured by the British Navy – some of the seeds were still viable, and this, two years on, is the result.

Here’s another one: this is a Banksia brownii….

…also known as a feather-leaved banksia (you can see how it got its name). This is critically endangered in its native Australia, with only two or three populations left in the wild. The Seedbank is growing on dozens of them in its cool greenhouse ready to go back home. One batch was returned last year: without this work the plant would be extinct within a decade.

I did recognise one plant there – this protea, just about to flower, is from wild populations on the Cape. The Seedbank works almost exclusively with wild populations – if I understood right, it’s because the lineage is purer, and seed from cultivars rarely comes true in any case.
Looking at these plants standing in rows on benches in the greenhouse, they look entirely normal and unremarkable. But these individuals at the forefront of survival for many species: without them their kind would simply die out.
You may be tempted to think that while that might be regrettable, it doesn’t really amount to a hill of beans in the grand scheme of things. But bear in mind that not one of these plants has been tested to find out what illnesses it can cure, or what useful purpose it can serve. Not that every plant has to have a purpose – but as was pointed out to me, a few years ago we didn’t know that daffodils contain galanthine which they now use to treat Alzheimers. So if we let any one of these plants die out, we could be throwing away chances we wouldn’t even know we might have had. That’s as good an argument as any, if you ask me.

Seeding the world #1

08 Sunday Mar 2009

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Sometimes I feel so privileged in my job. The other day I got to poke around in the back rooms of the Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place in Sussex – home to the seeds of 25,000 of the world’s plant species, some of which are the rarest plants in the world. Six of them are entirely extinct.

The place is like a nuclear bunker inside – in fact if World War Three ever does break out, head on down there as the walls are built of reinforced concrete so thick they’re entirely radiation proof and would survive a direct hit by a crashing aeroplane. Don’t ask me how they worked that out.

The seeds themselves are kept in huge walk-in freezers about the size of my kitchen, but the really amazing thing is that for now – they want to add to their number over time – there are just two of them. For 25,000 plant species. The concentrated biodiversity in those two freezers is just mind-boggling.

If you want a look at the kind of thing they have there, here’s a selection:

Aren’t seeds beautiful? And yes, that is a coco de mer – largest seed on earth. When you compare it to the dust-like antirrhinum seeds I put in last week, you realise just how much variety there is in the world.

The seeds come into the seedbank in big breatheable sacks from every continent – Kew has teams of botanists working with local experts in the field finding and collecting more and more plant samples to add to the bank. This is a sample of huge sycamore-like seeds from Madagascar. I think they’re called Gyrocarpus, at least that’s what it sounded like – in an environment like this even if you think you know quite a lot about plants, it’s not long before you’re out of your depth.

They test all the seeds for viability before they store them, using digital x-ray machines and all sorts of things. Then there’s the problem of working out exactly how to germinate them. Here’s one way of finding out – a mat with varying temperatures in bands across it. You put the seeds in little packets in rows along the heat bands, and wait. Then those that germinate on a certain heat band reveal the temperature the seed must be at in order to sprout. If that doesn’t work, there’s always cold stratification, chipping, bashing, soaking in various chemicals and even setting on fire (mainly reserved for the flora of the South African Cape, I believe).
It makes my little experiments in my greenhouse look like child’s play…