MODERN PLANT HUNTERS: ADVENTURES IN PURSUIT OF EXTRAORDINARY PLANTS
Pimpernel Press, £30 ISBN 978-1910258781
The idea of plant hunting seems to belong to a bygone age. Yet, as this book shows, it remains the most effective way to conserve endangered plants. Reviewer Ambra Edwards is a garden historian and writer.
Despite the Boy’s Own subtitle, readers will search these pages in vain for thrilling tales of derring-do. It’s not that today’s plant hunters do not endure the perils of the jungle, typhoon and blizzard, and the travails of hunger, cold and blood-sucking leeches just as their 19thcentury forebears did. It’s just that these misadventures are despatched in a few businesslike sentences. What interests Primrose is the broader context of plant exploration today, and the unintended consequences of the (very necessary) bureaucracy that surrounds it.
While a determined handful still search for ornamental plants for our gardens – notably Ken Cox, Dan Hinkley, Roy Lancaster, and Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones – most plant hunters today work for botanic gardens, universities or other scientific institutions, seeking to rescue what they can from the threats posed by climate change, water shortage, disease and
wholesale habitat destruction. Primrose describes how scientists scour herbaria to work out where plants still unknown to science may be growing. Those most at risk must be found first, and their seeds securely stored in a global network of seed banks. There is a particularly interesting chapter on the search for wild crop relatives – vital if we are to keep the planet supplied with food.
While no one can doubt the good intentions underlying the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, Primrose argues that they are doing more harm than good. ‘It is perfectly legal,’ he writes, ‘for a developer to kill plants covered by CITES, but illegal for a conservationist to transplant them the day before destruction.’ As plant hunting is restricted to only the largest and wealthiest institutions, it is biodiversity that is the loser.