Gardner’s WORLD
He’s part Monty Don, part David Attenborough, a globetrotting green evangelist fighting to save our rarest plants from his base in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden. Welcome to...
TO the north of Edinburgh city centre lies an oasis of calm, an impossibly beautiful garden filled with magic and wonder. Many who throng here in midsummer see it simply as a glorious escape, a place for an impromptu picnic in the shade of an ancient tree.
It seems an unlikely place to encounter an evangelist – particularly one in his late 60s dressed in a lichen-coloured jumper and charcoal jeans. Even stranger, perhaps, to find him proselytising beside a yew hedge. But then, this is no ordinary hedge and Martin Gardner is no ordinary missionary.
For most of its 350 years, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh – known affectionately by all and sundry as ‘the Botanics’ – has served as a living repository for plants collected from every corner of the world. Its herbarium – a library of three million specimens recovered by plant hunters including the great Charles
Darwin and Scots such as David Douglas, Archibald Menzies and George Forrest – generates almost biblical reverence as one of the world’s finest reference collections.
Gardner, though, has made it his life’s work to help transform the 70 acres of immaculately clipped lawns and carefully tended flowerbeds and glasshouses into so much more than a place to come and smell the roses.
In a 30-year career as co-ordinator of the garden’s renowned International Conifer Conservation Programme (ICCP), he has been fired by a belief that the Botanics should reach beyond its traditional role of simply classifying new species to saving as many as possible from the growing peril of climate change. So, in an act of bold symbolism, he won permission to rip out the neat suburban holly hedge that had lined the perimeter fence for decades and replace it with 2,000 small yews propagated from some of the oldest and most threatened examples.
The new conservation hedge which now encircles the Botanics serves both as a living library safeguarding the trees’ genetic material for the future and as an enchanting ‘story hedge’, weaving myriad myths, legends and tales rooted in these ancient trees.
It includes the progeny of Bruce’s Yew, said to have given shelter to Robert the Bruce, and the John Knox Yew, under which the reformer is believed to have delivered his first sermon in 1556.
Gardner’s extraordinary ten-year project has now spawned a book, The Yew Hedge, to be published on Monday, which documents his efforts to place the species, long regarded as a powerful emblem of resurrection and renewal, at the forefront of his imaginative approach to horticulture and his willingness to challenge the established orthodoxy.
His bosses had been loath to get rid of the holly bushes, which were clipped every year to maintain the beautiful barrier.
But Gardner felt the new hedge could illustrate that ‘we are intent on using every inch of this botanic garden to grow plants that fit with our scientific remit of conservation’.
A man of Tiggerish bounce, Gardner blends the easy charm of Monty Don with the quiet zeal of David Attenborough, although he brushes off such celebrity comparisons with an amused shake of the head as he hurtles around the garden in a breathless tour of its countless treasures.
He has brought some gems back from his own globetrotting efforts to save rare conifers. In Chile, he fell in love with the country, its people and, in particular, its monkey puzzles, the oddly angular trees which many won’t even realise are conifers.
‘They were around with the dinosaurs and are virtually unchanged today. They got their name from an 18th century landowner in Cornwall, who said the arrangement of branches was enough to puzzle a monkey,’ he said.
His obsession with Chilean plants once drove him and wife Sabina, a fellow plant researcher, to club together with Chilean academics to buy 100 hectares of threatened Andean rainforest near the Argentine border using money they had put aside to repair the leaking roof of their home, a short walk from the Botanics.
It earned Gardner, who admits to being ‘a bit of a risk-taker’, some notoriety in the Press. ‘One paper put me on page 3 with the headline ‘Martin’s Wet in Chile’ under the picture of a half-naked lady! How dare they!’ he said with mock indignation and a devilish smile.
‘Do you know, I used to use that picture in a lot of lectures. I had to do a report on the ICCP to the whole of the garden, led by our director, and I wanted to use that picture to say it doesn’t matter who we get into bed with in the name of conservation.’ He roars out loud at the memory.
The gamble was made easier by the fact he and his wife don’t have children to worry about – just a succession of cats they named after Chilean plants. In the end, it paid off, and the reserve they founded has grown to 1,500 hectares and become an important wildlife sanctuary.
The Gardners eventually got around to repairing their roof, but such mundane considerations pale against the thrill of discovering new species.
Near a plantation of monkey puzzles, he points out a rare conifer from Australasia, the critically endangered Wollemi Pine, which was known only through fossil records until a backpacker discovered one in 1994 growing in a narrow gorge near Sydney.
Time is fast running out for many of the plants he and his fellow conservationists are committed to rescuing from the ravages of global warming.
‘Rome is burning right now,’ he said bluntly, his brow suddenly clouded in concern. ‘The trees won’t be rushed but we have to learn as much as we possibly can to protect as many as we possibly can.’
The passage of time has preoccupied him more since he turned 67 and found himself confronted by retirement. The blow was softened by his continuing work as a research associate, an emeritus role which allows him to retain his precious ‘access all areas’ staff pass and involvement with many prestigious projects.
That includes entry to the two Grade-A listed Victorian palm houses and a modernist range of 1960s glasshouses currently closed to the public pending a multi-million-pound restoration programme.
The garden’s spectacular plants include the enigmatic Amorphophallus titanum or ‘corpse flower’ from the Indonesian island of Sumatra, which famously smells of rotting flesh on the rare occasions it flowers. ‘New Reekie’, as it is known to its loyal Twitter following, bloomed last month for the first time since 2019. Its sister plant is now flowering, but has yet to cause quite the same stink.
Spinning round a corner, Gardner breezes past a stack of nondescript small pots in a side corridor – samples of a rare juniper collected from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. ‘Juniperus saxicola; there are only 50 or so of these left in the wild today,’ he said airily without a backward glance.
Elsewhere, biosecurity seems tighter as we enter a lockable greenhouse and a glint of excitement lights up his eyes: ‘A lot of plants in here are from the tiny island of Soqotra in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Yemen. It’s very difficult to reach right now because of the political situation in the region.
‘Some of these specimens don’t get put on display and remain under lock and key to stop commercial horticulture getting their hands on them and making money out of them.
‘We have an agreement with the Yemeni government that they won’t
‘We have to learn as much as we possibly can’
be made available to commercial companies; it’s just for research.’
In a temperature-controlled growing room, samples of a new species of flowering shrub, Rayenia malalcurensis, are slowly sprouting, having been discovered in 2016 by rock climbers in a previously inaccessible region of the Chilean Andes.
‘This is just one of many new recent discoveries, said Gardner. ‘One of the botanists involved in this new discovery was trained at the Botanics.’
Despite his horticultural-sounding surname, Gardner rather fell into his profession, admitting he ‘didn’t spend a lot of time at school’, preferring to help a local ornithologist with bird census work near his home in southern England. ‘I had to know the names of the plants the birds nested in, so at the age of seven or eight I could pronounce long Latin names like Chamaecyparis lawsoniana, or Lawson cyprus, which is named after an Edinburgh horticulturalist,’ he said.
The son of a market gardener, he worked at Windsor Great Park at the age of 18 before moving to Edinburgh to study at the Botanics for three years.
After a stint as Windsor’s head of commercial horticulture, he returned to Edinburgh in 1991 to manage the ICCP, which took him around the world. In that role, he was instrumental in developing a network of 145 ‘safe sites’ across the UK – including Glasgow Botanic Gardens, Mount Stuart’s gardens on Bute and land owned by Forestry and Land Scotland – where 13,000 threatened conifers are being cultivated and protected.
For this conservation work, in particular on Chilean plants, he was awarded an MBE in 2013 and the Veitch Memorial Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society in 2014. Another book he co-authored in 2015, called Plants From The Woods and Forests of Chile, featuring a flattering foreword by Prince Charles, has just been reissued.
Explaining that climate change is ‘the cause of nearly all the threats today’, he adds that spreading conifers far and wide is ‘an insurance policy’ against exotic pests and diseases that could wipe them out in one area.
Gardner’s new book describes the yew’s central role in British folklore, as both a healer (one of the most successful cancer drugs, Taxol, is derived from yew) and a poison that can prove fatal to the wildlife that munch on it.
It explores the tree as a focus for worship from pagan times to its appropriation by Christianity (many now grow in or near churchyards). ‘In order to live a long time, they die within, leaving a hollow centre which makes dating them quite problematic,’ said Gardner.
‘We know that the oldest, like Fortigall [near Aberfeldy, Perthshire] are several thousand years old, but the fact that we can’t tell for certain how old some of these trees are is quite humbling, I think. It’s part of the mystery, suggesting we are not as smart as we think we are.’
Gardner and his wife have recently put down new roots of their own in Dumfries and Galloway, selling up in Edinburgh and finally loosening the ties with the Botanics.
‘It’s time,’ he said, ‘and other people need to grow in my place’.
As any horticulturalist will tell you, it is the natural order of things.
‘Climate change is cause of nearly all the threats to species today’