CARLOS MAGDALENA
CARLOS MAGDALENA is on a mission to save the plants. From his base at Kew Gardens, he travels the world to rescue tropical species from extinction. The botanical horticulturalist talks to JAMES LLOYD
Based at Kew Gardens, Carlos’s work to save rare plant species from extinction has earned him the nickname of ‘ The Plant Messiah’.
What started your love of plants?
I grew up in northwest Spain, in a region called Asturias on the Bay of Biscay. This is an incredibly biodiverse place, with the largest patch of primary deciduous forest in Europe, plus populations of wolves and brown bears! But it was also becoming one of the most industrialised areas in Spain. Within 30km, I could go from a lush, green world to a place of total destruction. I was fascinated by this contrast from an early age.
How did you end up working at Kew?
I didn’t have any formal qualifications in horticulture, but I managed to secure an internship in the Tropical Nursery. I enrolled on the three-year Kew Diploma in 2003, and over the next few years I began to earn a reputation for saving endangered tropical plants.
The ‘Plant Messiah’ nickname was given to me by a journalist in Spain, who obviously thought that I looked a bit like Jesus! But don’t worry, I don’t actually have a Messiah complex…
How do you actually go about saving a plant from extinction?
Sometimes saving a plant is as easy as taking a cutting from it, or collecting some fruits. The hard part is often the political bureaucracy. Once you’ve found a plant that’s endangered, you need to convince the country’s government to let you come and take a cutting, and then you have to get the plant safely back to the UK so that the science can begin.
Around 20 per cent of plant species are currently threatened with extinction. There are nearly 400,000 species of plants known to science, so saving all of them is a titanic task – we need a whole army of Plant Messiahs.
What’s been the proudest moment of your career so far?
It’s been saving the café marron plant. This gorgeous shrub has glossy green leaves and snow-white flowers, and it’s native to the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean.
The plant was thought to be extinct, but in 1980 a schoolboy found a specimen by the side of a road. Kew managed to grow cuttings from it, but the flowers weren’t producing the seeds necessary for it to survive in the wild. No one knew why; it became known as the ‘living dead’.
I became totally obsessed with this plant. By the time I arrived at Kew in 2003, there were several specimens of café marron, all from the same parent cutting. They were constantly producing flowers, which gave me lots of opportunities to try different things. Eventually, I developed a way to transfer the pollen between flowers, pollinating the plants at relatively high temperatures so that they produced fruit and seeds. Over the course of a year, 300 seeds were harvested in total, and we could reintroduce the species into its native habitat.
Does it really matter if a plant like the café marron goes extinct?
Everything has a knock-on effect. We know that this plant is pollinated by moths, which could also be endangered. By protecting one plant, we’re protecting an entire ecosystem. It’s like a plane flying at high altitude. We can remove the seats, the toilet, the carpets, and nothing much will happen. But we don’t know which extinction is going to be the one that removes the engine and brings the whole thing crashing down.
Why do you think plant extinctions get so much less media coverage than animal extinctions?
We suffer from plant blindness. If we’re shown a picture of a monkey in a rainforest, we’ll see the monkey but not the trees. Plants don’t run or fly; they don’t have fur or make funny noises, so we find it harder to feel for them. But economically, plants are more important to us than most animals. We depend on them for our clothes, medicines, food, building materials, oxygen, and so much more. Money really
does grow on trees.
What’s next on your list of plant species to save?
There’s this palm on Mauritius that’s known as ‘the loneliest tree on the planet’. The species was once widespread, but there’s now only one left in the entire world. We haven’t been able to grow it at Kew so far, but I’m confident we can do it.