The label is scrawled and inky, but it unmistakably says “Nyassa. Dr Livingston.” Despite the spelling mistake, it’s the Doctor Livingstone, I presume (quite rightly). Suddenly we are transported back to tropical central Africa in the early 1860s. David Livingstone was in what is modern-day Malawi, where it is hot and dry or hot and humid, except in the freezing night-time highlands. Livingstone’s wife Mary had recently died, and members of his expedition were starving by the end of a long trip.
For all this, the medical missionary was also a professional explorer, and what he had found was a new plant he called Faroa nyasica. The sample of dried flowers, stems, leaves and roots (like a shrivelled brown miniature hydrangea, though it is unrelated) was preserved and taken back to England, where it was donated to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in west London, taped to the top corner of a piece of paper and filed. And there it still is, along with 7 million other specimens stored in Kew’s Herbarium – the 18th century building attached to the grounds of the gardens dedicated to this purpose.
David Simpson, one of the assistant keepers of the Herbarium, shows me several specimens that illustrate its history, encompassing the rise and fall of the British Empire and figures including Captain Bligh, Charles Darwin and the Hookers of Kew (Sir William Hooker was the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, followed in that role by his son, Joseph, in 1865). There were many lesser-known adventurers, too, successes and failures who gave up their creature comforts – even their lives – to help build what is believed to be the world’s finest collection of samples of plants and fungi and related diaries, journals, letters, books and paintings .
The Herbarium might be run by “keepers”, but it is an active research centre: every year many of its 180 scientists travel the world, returning with 30,000 to 50,000 new samples. They are mapping new or lost discoveries (last year more than 250 of 2,000 newly “discovered” plants were found by Kew staff) and examining how ecosystems are coping in the face of human exploitation and climate change.
Each week, on average, 50 scientists visit the Herbarium to consult the specimens, and hundreds of samples are loaned out elsewhere. Every 40 years, on average, the building has to be extended to cope with the growing collection, with the opening of a new wing officially celebrated this month.. In two weeks’ time, scientists at Kew will also announce the results of the most comprehensive study ever to find out how many of the world’s one million or so named plants are at risk of extinction.
“This collection is not a museum,” says David Simpson. “It’s a museum in one sense, but it’s also a well-used, vitally important collection that’s equivalent to a database of plant information. Plants are not just beautiful and decorative; without them we simply couldn’t survive. From the sheets we sleep on, the clothes we wear for warmth and the food and medicine we depend on, plants are invaluable to humanity; their diversity sustains us now, and in the future it will enable us to adapt, innovate and ultimately to survive.”
History’s first enthusiastic botanist, as Carolyn Fry recounts in her recent study of the subject, The Plant Hunters, was the bearded Queen Hatshepsut, an Egyptian pharaoh in the 15th century BC. Reliefs from her prosperous reign show ships loaded with ebony and myrrh trees, as well as apes and panther skins taken from a mysterious land called Punt (its identity is still disputed). Later, Alexander the Great sent home specimens from his wars in north Africa and the east, and successive armies transported plants into their new territories: the Romans sowing wheat, corn, barley and olives to feed their armies; Muslims spreading orchard fruits like sour oranges, lemons, limes and apricots, and showy flowers – most famously at the Alhambra palace in the Spanish city Granada.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk