Kew Gardens—Transplant Center for the World
By Awake! correspondent in Britain
OVERCOMING his natural fear of heights, horticulturist Simon Goodenough, from London, England, found himself on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena, gingerly lowering himself on ropes down the face of a cliff. Eventually, he reached his goal and gently removed a lone specimen of a rare type of tree daisy from the side of the cliff. This nearly extinct shrub then began a 6,800-mile [11,000 km] journey to England for intensive care.
The plant responded so well to the treatment it received in England that it began to propagate. It was returned to St. Helena, and two years later the single rare plant had become a thousand, helping to reverse that island’s erosion problem.
This is just one of the many transplant successes achieved by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in London, England. But, you may wonder, why send this plant so far? What is so special about the gardens at Kew?
Gardens for Science and Pleasure
Upwards of one million visitors come to Kew each year to enjoy a visit to its 288 acres [117 ha] of well-arranged gardens. Whatever the season, the air is laden with the refreshing scents of many types of vegetation. Its living collection of over 40,000 different kinds of plants has caused Kew Gardens to be viewed by some as the finest botanical garden in the world. But there is more to Kew Gardens than mere beauty.
Did you know that one of the principal roles of botanical gardens is public education? Why, Kew has been described as “a university whose texts are flowers”! How did this botanical seat of learning get started?
Ever since the middle of the 18th century, when Augusta, the Dowager Princess of Wales, cultivated gardens on her land alongside the river Thames at Richmond, Kew has been a center of horticultural interest. But it was largely thanks to Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) that Kew Gardens became famous. He organized a massive plant-gathering project, and from London, botanists traveled the world seeking out plant specimens to bring back for classification. The result? Kew has one of the largest collections of dried and pressed vegetation in the world, its files containing details of some 6,500,000 plants.
Famous Successes
Kew’s envoys helped move plants from one area of the globe to another. David Nelson, a Kew gardener, set sail from England in 1787 on board the famous ship Bounty, under the command of Captain Bligh. His mission? To collect carbohydrate-rich breadfruit from Tahiti in the South Pacific and plant them as a food source in the Caribbean. The ill-fated voyage ended in mutiny, with Nelson, a castaway with the captain, eventually making land on the Indonesian island of Timor, where he died. Other Kew representatives followed, however, and the breadfruit finally reached its destination on the island of St. Vincent.
Economic botany, or the search for useful plants, became Kew’s speciality. The Gardens contributed to the production of a substance that some believe altered the history of the world: quinine, a potent antimalaria drug extracted from the bark of a Peruvian cinchona tree.
A certain Clements Markham nurtured the ambition to help control the malaria that scourged the subcontinent of India. In 1859 he set off with gardeners from Kew to explore Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, to collect seeds and plants of every known species of the evergreen cinchona. Despite bad weather and the rigors of transshipment, some seedlings reached the protection of Kew’s greenhouses. Here, under the experts’ tender care, they reproduced and subsequently were dispatched to India. It was not long before doses of quinine became regularly available in the villages of India.
A display case in a Kew museum graphically depicts another transplant success story. There you can see details of the collection of rubber-tree seeds (Hevea brasiliensis). Joseph Hooker, a former director of Kew, devised a project to transfer these seeds from South America to Kew. Despite transportation difficulties, 70,000 seeds finally arrived in Liverpool, England, where they continued their journey by special train to Kew. Although only 2,397 of them germinated successfully, within two months 1,919 were shipped to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Malaya. From these grew today’s vast rubber plantations in those lands.
Other 19th-century achievements of Kew include the selecting of trees to grow on Ascension Island, which previously was almost treeless. The Gardens sent cacti to the Canary Islands for use in rearing the cochineal insect, which when pulverized is used as a coloring agent in cosmetics and some drinks. Many other useful plants were shipped to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States.
But what of Kew today? Do we still benefit from its gardeners’ expertise?
England’s Therapeutic Climate
The Gardens’ director sees their function as concerned with “disseminating knowledge on economic plants suitable for cultivation in different regions of the world, particularly the arid tropics.” He believes that the depletion of fossil-fuel reserves such as coal and oil will force mankind to use plants as its primary source of fuel and medicinal compounds. Some areas already enjoy an improved environment thanks to cultivating plants studied at Kew for their ability to provide good soil cover for the land.
To combat the ravages of plant infection, a system of “intermediate quarantining” is proving useful. Any diseased plant material arriving at Kew needs time for treatment before traveling on to its new destination. Here is where England’s climate proves to be therapeutic. For example, controlled exposure to Kew’s temperate weather kills the infection that sometimes contaminates West Indian cocoa. Such treatment allows the now-healthy plants to resume their journey to enhance the West African crop.
Threat of Extinction
The fight is also on to preserve plants. “Of the 300,000 plant species that live on the five continents, at least 20,000 are threatened with extinction,” says Peter Raven, director of the St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., botanical garden. The French magazine Science et Vie, (Science and Life) adds: “This number could well increase to 40,000 before the middle of the next century. That is one in seven!” Faced with such a critical situation, what is being done to stop the trend toward extinction?
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature maintains a monitoring unit at Kew. Here scientists carefully study the seeds of endangered plants and observe the optimum conditions for their cultivation. With this information, they assess how to mimic a plant’s environment. Then the gardeners start the process of “bulking up,” or propagating, the endangered species.
A further protection is the plan to ensure that all threatened species are grown in more than one botanical garden. How is this arranged? By the exchange of seeds between botanical gardens, which has led to the establishment of seed banks. Maintaining these banks is seen as an investment for the future.
You may wonder why such conservation warrants the great efforts that botanical gardens expend. The Natural World, edited by Malcolm Coe, suggests one pressing reason: “Damage to the stability and resilience of ecosystems will ultimately damage man’s well-being.”
Striking, indeed, have been the successes achieved by Kew Gardens, such as transplanting the shrub that now helps fight St. Helena’s erosion problems. But can these successes be repeated elsewhere? To what extent will transplanting make arid regions fertile? Only time will tell. But meantime, we appreciate the work of Kew Gardens’ dedicated botanists and horticulturists. And perhaps one day, you may even have the opportunity to visit and see for yourself this “transplant center for the world.”
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Giant lily pads in a conservatory in Kew Gardens
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Regal Pelargonia grenada, one of some 250 varieties of geranium
Hibiscus flowers come in white, pink, red, yellow, and orange
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There are some one hundred species and thousands of varieties of roses around the world
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The pagoda is a famous landmark in Kew Gardens