Recharging Hope, Wonder and Delight at Kew Gardens
At The Borrowed Earth Project, we are signed up members of the fan club for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. It is not only that they loaned us footage of their work on the Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst for our film on Biodiversity and Climate Change, although that certainly helped.
They undertake such vital work and have become such an international centre of excellence on every aspect of plants, biodiversity, prevention of extinction, resilience to climate change. And yet this inspirational scientific work is set in gardens which can just transport you with amazement, even if you know as little about plant taxonomy as I do. This article is based on what I learned from one morning’s visit, and the research represents their work not mine.
Chestnut-leaved Oak
I have never visited Kew Gardens without discovering at least one tree species that I had never heard of. This time it was the great Chestnut-leaved oak, planted by Kew’s first director Sir William Jackson Hooker in 1846 from an acorn collected in the Caucasus, and now 38 metres high and the largest tree in Kew’s collection.
Bananas and Coffee
Apparently, in the UK, we eat about 5 billion bananas a year. I find this astonishing, look at my fellow citizens with new respect, and wonder how we find the time to do anything else. Most of the bananas are from one variety, the Cavendish, which has been bred to produce no seeds. The plants all have to be bred from cuttings, and are genetic clones of the parent plant, which makes them very susceptible to diseases which can spread worldwide, such as the TR4 fungus. In February 2024 a new genetically modified form of banana with a disease resistant gene from a wild banana species, was approved for cultivation.
Bananas
While wandering in the Palm House, I also learned that the world’s two leading varieties of coffee, arabica and robusta, are potentially threatened by rising temperatures due to climate change, but was mightily relieved to learn that Kew scientists and collaborators see much promise – flavour and climate resilience – in a rare and threatened wild coffee species which they have helped preserve.
Fuel from invasive species
Currently 80% of the global production of biofuels comes from just six plants, all important food crops. It is not a good time for the bioethanol industry in the UK, which is collapsing due to the removal of tariffs on US bioethanol recently agreed in the US/UK trade deal.
However, an international team of scientists from the UK, India and Uganda, led from the University of Leeds, and funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council is investigating the use of Water Hyacinth (Pontederia crassipes) as a biofuel. This could be an important breakthrough as Water Hyacinth is a highly destructive invasive species causing immense damage to waterways in 100 countries.
Amazonian and Bolivian Giant Waterlilies
Madagascar Periwinkle (Catharanthus roseous)
Earlier this year I bought a notebook made from Water Hyacinth fibre in a Fairtrade shop in Accra, Ghana, and we earlier reported on a teenage entrepreneur in Kenya who not only founded an NGO but also set up a business making computer cases and handbags from Water Hyacinth fibre - just one of a number of imaginative re-uses of one of the most problematic of all invasive species.
This common house plant, brought from Madagascar used to be used to help with diabetes and digestive ailments. It has since been found that two of the alkaloids found in the sap of this plant are important in the treatment of leukaemia and Hodgkins disease. It takes one tonne of leaves to produce one dose. In the 1960s, only 20% of childhood leukaemia victims survived. Now 95% have a chance of remission due to the drugs produced by this one plant. I often think of the Madagascar Periwinkle when listening to debates about why one single species can matter so much.
Rosa Dame Judi Dench
World’s oldest pot plant?
There is something more than stellar plant science going on at Kew Gardens. World news can seem relentlessly grim, and optimism and hope ground down, But here is a place to re-charge, where children run about among the wonders of the plant kingdom, where the Rwandan Pygmy Waterlily has been saved for future generations from a muddy puddle, where endangered Wollemi Pines are grown with careful skill, and a plant that flourished during the French Revolution still flourishes in the Palm House. It is a glimpse of something better.