As an evolutionary biologist, Kew’s director of science, Prof Kathy Willis - knew where she wanted to begin her story for this new Radio 4 series – in front of Kew’s oldest resident - the cycad (Encephalartos altensteinii) in the iconic botanical garden's palm house.
By happy coincidence, the cycad's arrival at Kew in 1775 coincided with the development of Carl Linnaeus’ binomial classification system for plants (and animals). All at once, the chaos of the plant world, which previously had no consensus on plant names, was reduced to order and modern botany, as we know it today, took root.
The cycad (Encephalartos altensteinii)
In this new series Kathy Willis focuses on the major breakthroughs in botanical knowledge over the past 250 years as seen through the lens of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. In some cases Kew was the institution leading the scientific discoveries, in others it was responding to work elsewhere. Some of the science, of course, has changed beyond recognition in the 250 years since Kew was founded, with rapid advances in the understanding of, for example, molecular biology, and the technology to exploit it. But often the questions plant scientists have been trying to answer have remained pretty much the same.
Kathy Willis
What soon emerges in the Plants: From Roots to Riches story is that the first plant scientists were genuine pioneers. Some, of course, found themselves barking up the wrong tree, or even scraping at the wrong bark. But the real characters are the plants themselves, from the orchid that looks like a bee to the waterlily big enough to sit a child on. They exerted a powerful fascination that has inspired at once a quest for knowledge about their science, a cultural interest in taming, growing and (often) eating plants from the furthest corners of the Empire, and through a Western ion to understand and witness these compelling curiosities.
The Amazonian Waterlily (photo: RBGKew)
A great scientist once said that the important thing is not simply to accumulate facts, but to ask challenging questions and to seek to answer them. Some of the greatest challenges on earth today – population growth, food security and disease are intimately connected to our symbiotic relationship with plants and fungi.
Plants and fungi will certainly provide at least some of the solutions. The terminology and the scale may have changed: we can probably afford to believe that we will never again allow an entire country to starve because of lack of understanding of plants’ genetic diversity (as happened in Ireland in the 1850s). But, in the historical scientific literature it is remarkable how often we find long-dead scientists asking the same questions that we are still asking today: what plant and fungal diversity occurs on Earth and how is it distributed? What plants (and where) do we need to conserve in order to militate against ecological scarcity and environmental risk? Which plants and plant characteristics enable resilient and sustainable landscapes in the face of changes in our environment?
This is a story that’s still going on. There may not be quite as many grey beards and waistcoats as in the days of Kew’s first botanists, but the scientists are still there. Joseph Hooker, Kew’s early director and close confidante of Charles Darwin, would no doubt have been deeply satisfied that his ionate belief in the importance of plants, and his ideas about how to learn from them, are still at the heart of what plant science addresses today.
the series to keep from the Plants: From Roots to Riches podcast page
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Palm tree and cycad images © Kew Gardens
