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WORK TITLE: The Plant Messiah
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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PERSONAL
Born 1972 in Gijon, Asturias, Spain; son of a florist.
EDUCATION:Kew Gardens, horticulture program.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Kew Gardens Tropical Nursery, senior botanical horticulturist. Worked formerly as a waiter and sommelier, and an intern at Kew.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Carlos Magdalena, nicknamed “The Plant Whisperer,” is a botanical horticulturist at Kew Gardens in London. Magdalena was born in 1972, in Gijon, Asturias, Spain, a region that is cloudy, moist, and mossy. Asturias is a combination of ocean, mountain, and precipitation, and contains the largest primary deciduous forest in Europe. Growing up in the region, Magdalena developed a passion for botany. His passion for plant life also comes from familial influence; his mother was a florist and his grandfathers were farmers. Deeply concerned with the current decline in biodiversity, Magdalena is committed to conserving biodiversity.
Magdalena worked on various plant-related projects in Spain before moving to London in his twenties. He worked for years as a waiter and sommelier before beginning an internship at Kew Gardens, a botanical garden in Southwest London that houses the largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collection in the world. After excelling at his internship, he was accepted into their three-year horticulture program. He now works in the Tropical Nursery at Kew.
Magdalena’s first book, The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species, details his plant-centered trips around the world. Much of Magdalena’s career has involved traveling to various regions of the world to study rare plants and help the locals implement practices to preserve them, or bring samples of the plants back to the lab in London to discover what is required to encourage them to propagate. Describing the book, a contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote The Plant Messiah “is bound to enthrall readers and get them thinking more fully about plants.”
The book opens with a biography of Magdalena, starting with his upbringing in Spain. He cites his mother as a huge influence on his love of plant life, and the terrain of Asturias the perfect natural world to explore. He writes that his family grew weary of his plant and animal obsession, eventually prohibiting him from bringing any more wildlife into the home. As a result, Magdalena focused his attention solely on plants, exploring both the outdoor world and his family’s orchards.
The primary focus of the book is Magdalena’s adventures since joining Kew Gardens. Included in these adventures is a trip to Rodrigues Island, a remote territory Mauritius, to find the native cafe marron tree. Thought to be extinct, the tree was discovered by a schoolboy in 1979. Magdalena describes discovering a seed of the tree and bringing it back to the lab, where it successfully propagated. His work takes him all over the world, from hikes deep into the Amazonian rain forest to working with locals in Bolivia to propagate Brazil nuts outside of their natural habitat. He describes the risky and adventurous moments in his work, such as attempting to avoid crocodiles as he plodded though mud in northeast Australia on a waterlily hunt, and experiencing the buzz of coca leaves while in Peru, developing ‘seed balls’ to restore native forests.
A contributor to Economist noted: “The most gripping passages are about his work with the last remnants of a species–a handful of seeds glued to an envelope or a plant discovered living in a single bubbling spring.” In the plant world, waterlilies are Magdalena’s true passion. He writes about his role in saving the smallest waterlily in the world from extinction. The lily, discovered by Eberhard Fischer, a German botanist, in 1985, is found in one place in the world; a volcanic hot spring in Mashyuza, Rwanda. In 2008, the water from the spring where the lily grew was diverted to provide water for the locals, immediately destroying the entire natural colony. Only Fisher’s samples remained. Unable to successfully propagate the plant, Fisher turned to Magdalena, who accomplished the feat.
Magdalena explains the perfection of diverse plant life, pointing to the fact that each component of a plant has a role. A leaf’s shape and size may help dissipate the pressure from wind, influence transpiration, fight off invading pests, or capture or expel light or wind. He also describes the excitement of discovering the specific formula required to incite a plant to germinate. He describes certain types of seeds from South Africa that require a specific chemical found only in smoke to germinate. Other seeds can never get dry or they will die. Magdalena compares this process to figuring out a puzzle or cracking a code; each action must be thoughtful, informed, and forward-thinking.
The author’s opinions and concerns regarding natural life permeate the book. He writes about the reality that one sixth of earth’s plants face extinction, and warns against a future sixth mass extinction event. Tucked within each of his stories is a strong message that plant life is integral to human life, and we must to all we can to conserve it.
Alan Moores in Booklist described The Plant Messiah as “a book that will inspire wonder, even hope,” while a contributor to Kirkus Reviews wrote: “Magdalena’s excitement about plants and their propagation is contagious, and even those lacking green thumbs should be fascinated by his travels and adventures in science.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist February 15, 2018, Alan Moores, review of The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species, p. 4.
Economist (US), June 10, 2017, review of The Plant Messiah, 82.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of The Plant Messiah.
Publishers Weekly, January 1, 2018, review of The Plant Messiah, p. 48.
CARLOS MAGDALENA
Botanical Horticulturist, "The Plant Messiah"
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Carlos Magdalena, the “the Plant Messiah/Whisperer” is a senior botanical horticulturist quoted as having the uncanny ability to bring plants back from the brink of extinction. He has worked at Kew Gardens, which he describes as a “museum of living things,” for fourteen years. He is fascinated by plants, how they live, breathe and function and the immensely important role they play for humanity.
Without plants the planet would be lifeless. For Carlos the loss of plant species globally but especially in the tropics is alarming. He is dedicated to do what he can to use the resources at Kew to save what can be saved before it is too late.
Carlos was born in 1972, in Gijon, Asturias, Spain, a little known part of Europe that is a “misty, moist, wet, damp, cold, cloudy, mossy, Atlantic piece of land.” Carlos enthuses that “Asturias is a very unusual and yet-to-be discovered part of Europe.” boasting “the largest patch of primary deciduous forest, the last viable population of brown bear and the largest of wolf in Western Europe. Other biological jewels in the crown include the highest densities of otter, boar and chamois on the continent.” Right from his earliest life, this enchanting geographical combination of mountain, sea and rain inspired carlos to a lifestime fascination with biological diversity.
Carlos’ family were all involved in one way or another with plants, for example, Carlos’s mother was a florist and grandfathers farmers. However, Carlos’ early passion for flora and fauna was unprecedented and drove his family slightly mad until “a ban on feathery/furry family members took place.” This ban did not include a large aviary in his parents' orchard or aquariums, of which he had many.
After years working in Spain on various plant related projects Carlos relocated to London and began an internship at Kew. This went well and soon he won a place on the prodigious Kew Diploma. Today he is still there having secured a permanent position in the Tropical Nursery.
Picture: Rebecca Reid
Picture: Rebecca Reid
A MISSION IN THIS LIFE
Carlos is greatly alarmed by the current crash in biodiversity on our planet that has been called the “6th mass extinction event.” The last one happened 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs and other species were wiped out by a giant meteorite crashing into the mexican desert. Today, species are going extinct as a result of human activities, principally, habitat destruction, excessive extraction of natural resources and climate change.
Carlos says that “the value of a species is much greater than a piece of art.” Each species is a unique evolutionary experiment that cannot be recreated. We have no idea exactly what role each species plays in the biosphere or what it might contribute to human society. Every plant is a potential chemistry lab creating useful substances we can use. More than this, people like Carlos are deeply inspired and moved by the diversity of life that surrounds us. Conserving biodiversity is not just about what plants and animals can do for us but about celebrating the wonderful diverse world we live on and all the mysteries and new things we have to discover. Other species have value just because they exist.
Carlos sees a plant nursery as “a noah’s arc that travels through time” as well as space. The work of him and others like him creates special reservoirs of diversity for species away from their homes which may be getting ransacked by extractive industries. For example, the world’s smallest lily was discovered in 1985 by Eberhard Fischer, a German botanist. It used to grow only in one hot volcanic spring, in a place called Mashyuza in rural Rwanda. In 2008, the hot spring where the wildflower lived was diverted to provide water for a local laundry. Immediately, the entire species was obliterated in its natural habitat, only Fischer’s samples remained.
Fischer was able to keep his precious lily specimens alive, but no one was able to work out how to make them propagate so that they could reproduce (ie. get the seeds to grow on to a flower size, closing the reproductive cycle of the plant). The tiny lily might have been doomed were it not for the intervention of Carlos’ magic green fingers. Samples where sent to Kew where eventually they were passed to the “code-breaker” who discovered that by exposing the plant to the air it could be made to flower and reproduce. One day the lily could be returned to its special place in the wild world - that exceptional spring in Rwanda.
WHY CARLO'S WORK MATTERS
The loss of species from our planet has been compared to rivets popping out of an aeroplane. The first rivets can be lost without problems, but, eventually, the plane starts to disintegrate and a crash is inevitable. Nobody can know for sure which species it is okay to lose and which are critical. What we do know is that the more we lose the more fragile whole ecosystems become. If we lose too many species from the Amazon the whole global system could crash which would have devastating repercussions for life as we know it.
Kew gardens and Carlos Magdelena are on the front lines battling this immense danger for the whole of humanity and for the future of life on this planet. Every species, seed and habitat they manage to nurture in their gardens can be used in the future to rehabilitate wild habitats.
Although Carlos is quiet, soft spoken and modest it is clear he understands the importance of his work. He says “I am doing what I should be doing.” He is an inspiring man who has found a way to use his skills to make a significant and valuable contribution to the world.
GET INVOLVED
We might not have the skills nor experience that Carlos has, nor access to the facilities at Kew Gardens. However, we all can get involved in efforts to protect our precious biodiversity against further loss. This massively under-reported issue could have potentially huge repercussions for us and especially for our children. If we want them to grow up in a planet abundant with wild animals then we must take action now to ensure that large parts of the planet remain wild and habits remain where species can thrive. Without this balance our world may well change beyond recognition.
If we have a garden or outdoor space we can help local wildlife by growing local plants species and attracting pollinators. This is also hugely satisfying and nourishing. Grow Wild is one initiative that offers a way to do this in easy wildflower seed kits for community use.
There are many charities that are working to protect global biodiversity. Kew raises funds through the Kew Foundation to support scientific research into plants and produce an annual landmark study on The State of the World’s Plants. Find out more about how to support Kew on their website here
WWF is also working on these issues and smaller organizations that crowd source investment to protect wild spaces such as Healthy Planet and Cuipo.
SCIENTIST • 15TH/SEP/2015 • • •
Carlos Magdalena
The Plant Messiah
We met Carlos Magdalena, better known as 'The Plant Messiah', under the mystical circumstances of a total solar eclipse. In this environment we expected nothing short of magic, and that is exactly what we got.
52 INSIGHTSCarlos Magdalena The Plant Messiah • 15th/Sep/2015
Behind the fantasy-like-glasshouses of Kew Gardens, we meet with this native Spaniard where horticulturalists work tirelessly around the clock studying the behaviour of plants from around the world.
Spending an hour with Carlos is an enlightening experience. This is a man who understands the richness of our biodiversity – the causality between our actions and the environment. The world that Carlos lives in is far from that of the ordinary city dweller, however, he makes us see that even a house pot plant has a language and that our future as a species depends on our awareness of this.
Carlos, it’s a pleasure to meet you. So as far as we know, plants communicate through very intricate ecosystems. How much do we actually know about their systems and how do you approach your work in terms of how humans interact with plants?
I try to take myself out of the centre of the universe and put myself in the place of a plant. I also try to think about things in a very abstract way, because there are many ‘facts’ we don’t ‘see’ or at least don’t easily perceive. For instance, chemical messages; it is something that mostly escapes us when we use our natural senses.
You hear about sophisticated molecules such as hormones, growth regulators and DNA. While all of it can be studied methodically by scientists in a lab, it’s very difficult to understand; the languages are many, the number of conversations occurring at the same time is simply overwhelming. Although we have built-up masses of information and a deep understanding, I still feel like a kind of alien being able to tap into conversations between people from many different places in an attempt to find out what the planet is really saying. In a single leaf there are constellations of cells, each containing numerous ‘chatty people’, and they are all delivering speeches at a chemical level.
“In a single leaf there are constellations of cells each containing numerous ‘chatty people’, and they are all delivering speeches at a chemical level.”
CARLOS MAGDALENA
When you look at the incredible diversity of the plant world, it’s just mesmerising the variance of shapes, designs and colours. If we only look at the diversity of shapes found in native British trees – a tiny percentage of the world’s plant diversity – it is easy to conclude that each species has a specific leaf shape. None of this happens by chance. Shape and texture are the response of the plant to dissipate the strength of the wind, reduce or increase the transpiration, fight off the pests, evacuate or capture more or less light or water, or maybe dust. Everything has a little magic. Yet, everything has a meaning.
As animals, it is a very strange experience to try and understand plants. They do not have, for instance, an immune system like we do, composed of ‘free moving cells’ that are ‘soldier like’ and patrolling their organisms. Yet they are capable of triggering immune responses when under threat by a pest or pathogen. There is interesting research that suggests some plants, when infected with an insect or fungal disease, are able to send messages to other plants to warn them. Other plants then start to increase chemical defences specific to that issue.
Other evidence suggests that some species are able to send chemical signals that attract the predators of the pest they are being affected by. In my opinion, we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of plant communication. Interestingly, there are internal conversations between cells inside plants, but even more interestingly, science is starting to see that they actually ‘talk’ (if we can use that term for chemical signalling) to other kingdoms, such as fungi or insects.
Plants do not have a nervous system with a central organ that coordinates the activity, like we animals do. They do not have a brain, so how do you communicate with no brain and no nervous system? How do you respond to stimuli? (and they do this very well and constantly) It’s really difficult to understand and to research, especially when the entities that study them do have a brain and nervous cells. Put yourself into the place of a plant: no brain, you can’t move fast (although many plants have very rapid movements), you can’t run for shelter or water or nutrients. You are ‘fixed’ to one place. Yet you manage to obtain information, translate it, make a response, attract a pollinator for reproduction, then use another animal or natural phenomenon for seed dispersal, host bacteria to help you with nutrients and establish an ‘internet-like’ network with the fungi in the soil, connecting you with other plants or perhaps even your own progeny. Fascinating, at least to me. No magic, no witchery, just another frontier of knowledge that we had only started to unravel.
You were born in Gijon, Asturias. You mentioned in a previous interview that you, “come from a misty, moist, wet, damp, cold, cloudy, mossy, Atlantic piece of land”. How did your birthplace and background inform your work?
In many different ways. Firstly, because the whole natural history of the place is quite incredible. I come from a place which still has a large population of wild bears. There are wolves, capercaillies and wild salmon in the rivers. There are a lot of plants that are unique to that area, also some animals that only live there or distant places like Russia. There are areas that contain primary temperate rainforests. But also mountains and high rainfall means there is mining and industry. So I had both worlds around the corner; untouched unique nature and wildlife along with massive industrial areas, some of the towns being amongst the most polluted in Europe – 30 minutes was all it took to travel from heaven to hell. Also, I come from a place that is culturally more like the Atlantic cultures found in Scotland, England or Wales. We drink cider instead of wine, play bagpipes, eat a lot of pork and have a Celtic background. Because the weather and biodiversity there was closer to the British one, the cultural background was also similar – the apple trees grew better than wine vines.
It was also clear to me that we had a massive impact on the environment; be it farmers using farming techniques that allowed one of the highest diversities of orchid in a single meadow in Europe or the most depleted of life and toxic rivers you can imagine, due to charcoal mining. Clearly, to some extent, the environment we live in plays a vital role in who we are, but also what we do has a clear impact on the way the environment is, like a fish that bites its own tail. Sociologically, it was also interesting to live with all sorts of people; from transhumant farmers that spent the summers in alpine meadows and moved down to the coast in winter, to engineers that make heavy steel structures to be used in a nuclear power facility; from living cultures that date from 1000s of years ago to very modern and complex societies, all along the same river, talking the same language but living in a different world.
You said in an interview, “Psychologists say that every child has an early development stage where it is very interested in animals and forms of life. I guess that I never overcame that stage (I may even need therapy!)”
Well, I have a natural admiration for all forms of life; I find them more interesting than anything, on many levels. On a scientific level, they are second to none. From the design point of view, it’s the biggest source of inspiration you can get; if a concept has not been used in nature, then it is likely it is not a good concept.
As I said, I have a natural ‘built-in’ awe and admiration for nature. Most kids have that admiration or curiosity for the natural world – I just never ‘grew out’ of that phase. However, do not get confused; this is not a childish behaviour, it is just that as society we are extremely good at killing that natural interest in nature that we all have. In me it has somehow survived into adulthood. I never moved on and left it behind, I still am stuck in step one, which is a fascination of nature.
However, this does seems to go across age-ranges and even across cultural, religious and national barriers. But often enough, at some point, many of us stop looking at ladybirds and butterflies as we have these stigmas that we build up such as ‘that’s for girls’, or ‘it doesn’t make me any money’, so we remove it from our daily agenda. Whatever the reason is, there seems to be a trend of disconnecting from nature.
Seas rising, glaciers retreating, ice-caps melting, forests decreasing, humans increasing the population numbers. We want to eat more. Meanwhile, we don’t become more efficient; we become much more wasteful, we destroy anything that may arise in the landscape. War, conflicts, famine, natural disasters. Yes, ok, it may all sound very political, indeed, but at the end of the day it is simple; one of the things I find really interesting is that after all, most of it happens only because of this disconnection we have to nature and the environment.
It’s almost representative of all humans; at some point along the trajectory we lost our interest in relying on nature because we feel we don’t need it and everything is synthetic, but actually, it’s not true; we are still relying 100% on natural resources and we cannot escape the reality that it is not us versus nature; we are nature.
“If a concept has not been used in nature, then it is likely it is not a good concept.”
CARLOS MAGDALENA
“There exists no shortage of wonder drugs waiting to be found in rainforests” – A statement from a well-known ethnobotanist, Mark Plotkin. He went on to say that we know little or nothing about the chemical composition of 98.6% of the Brazilian flora, despite the fact that, even now, the value of medicines derived from tropical plants is more than $6 billion a year.
Totally! Actually, coffee is the second most traded substance in the world and the coffee industry is one of the biggest employers in the world. Now, people do not tend to see coffee as a ‘drug’ nor as a medicine, however, on a Monday morning at 6am it is clearly a medicine or, at least, a ‘fix’. But if you think more in the lines of drugs in ‘pill format’, meaning commercialised and doctor-prescribed drugs, you will find that one of the most traded ‘brand products’ are medicines which are used to treat cholesterol (statins) and they were discovered quite recently in fungi, also in some cereals. Medicines for HIV have been found in plants as well. Even the ones which may have been designed in labs once, it was later found that those chemicals or similar ones were already found in some form or another in wild plants or fungi.
So it’s very easy to forget, but the most important items for human survival and wealth is plants and fungi. They produce all the energy that humans need for most of our activities. Even fossil fuels like coal and petrol come from fossil plants and ecosystems from other eras. Now by burning that and releasing that into the air we are warming up the planet because that carbon dioxide gets released into the air. This alone demonstrates the fact that plants in distant geological eras were capable of capturing that CO2 from the air and fixing it deep in the ground. Plants, algae, fungi, are the best bet we can place on: a) obtaining alternative biofuels to fossil resources of energy, b) they could potentially fix all that CO2 excess that we are releasing in the atmosphere and c) producing food for us and the animals we eat. This is so obvious yet so easily missed.
The human fuel, which is basically food, is 100% plants or things that eat plants. We mostly rely on 6-7 crops worldwide; things like wheat, bananas, rice, etc. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of species of plant out there. If you look at the size and yield of early crops of maize and what they produce per plant at present, one can easily conclude that there is a HUGE potential to be released and that each species is in fact a treasure. We cannot also miss the fact that relying on so few crops is risky as one crop can be wiped out quickly by a pest, and let’s not rule out other factors such as global warming.
I want to understand the original point. Do we need it? I am playing devils advocate here – I am just fascinated, because in your work you’ve been described as a code-breaker and part of your work is putting the pieces of the puzzle back together. Is there any point, because we’re past this threshold now where humanity has almost admitted we can create whatever we want through technology?
That’s part of the problem, thinking like that; thinking that we can do everything while being detached from nature when we actually can’t, or at least we can’t afford it at many levels. We can’t produce all this oxygen; we cannot produce it at the scale that is happening naturally. We can get carbon dioxide and under vacuum conditions split it with a laser to produce carbon monoxide and oxygen. Carbon monoxide is toxic, and lasers and creating vacuum conditions require energy, thus fuels. So far I’m sticking to planting something.
We have this ‘god’ mentality. Some may say, ‘we can go to the moon and back’. But they forget that the astronauts came back from the moon inside a capsule that used several layers of cork oak as the main source of isolation from the scorching heat of the friction against the atmosphere on reentry. Where ever you look, there is a plant involved, and yes, ok, nowadays, we use some hi-tech ceramic to do the same job, yet that ceramic is way less sustainable, needs masses of fuel to be made and its use has an overall negative impact. Yet cork oak is sustainable and supports an array of biodiversity. There is not yet a remote possibility of living as isolated organisms.
No single organism will thrive in this planet without the interaction with other ones.
I want to know a little more about what you do here? I think about you as some kind of rogue activist, like Indiana Jones in the glass houses. I’m interested in the story and your work.
Let’s start with a little history: Kew was started by King George III, ‘The farmer’. He was living in Kew palace and clearly he knew what the potential of biodiversity was, he was also the first British Monarch to study science systematically, including agriculture. He started keeping different races of cattle around Kew Palace and his wife Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Streliz was an amateur Botanist who developed the Kew Gardens. History has demonstrated then that a batch of seeds could prop or topple the economy of a country – the rubber tree could serve as a good example of this.
You’re talking about Henry Wickham? In the summer of 1876 Kew paid £700 to Henry Wickham for thousands of rubber seeds that he smuggled out of the Amazonian rainforest.
Indeed. Quite controversial at the time as it collapsed some economies in South America while releasing a biological asset to the rest of the world, breaking a monopoly in times where rubber was all so important due to the lack of other petrol based materials, such as plastic.
“History has demonstrated that a batch of seeds could prop or topple the economy of a country.”
CARLOS MAGDALENA
So, what’s Kew’s purpose?
Despite times moving on, and not any longer being a part of the Victorian times, we do however still realise the increasing importance of preserving biodiversity, especially plant and fungi resources. But there is a problem, a big one: there is about 400,000 species of plant, and a huge number of unknown ‘yet to be discovered’ species. So first thing we do is taxonomy; someone has to be classifying, cataloging and exploring, sampling, naming. If you do not know what it is out there how on earth could you even think of protecting it or using it as resource? This is a titanic task. A timeless task too, as the historical herbarium specimens have to be kept forever as reference. And yes, 400,000 species are good news to us. But how scary is this figure: one out of four, so 100,000 is in real danger of becoming extinct in the near future. So we also work on knowing the trends, occurrences and historical distribution of the species and guess trends and drive priorities.
Eventually we also found those that are clinging to life with less than a few individual plants left. It is not the first time we stopped extinction from the last plant or the last batch of seeds. Actually, there has been a case in which a species was recovered from the last few living cells of an otherwise 95% dead embryo. It is that bad. Thus conservation stems from us and the botanical work we do. Several million herbarium specimens collected for more than 250 years and tidy housekeeping gives you a lot of accurate information towards the rarity of a species
Then, and because this is the 21st century, we do work at the molecular level too. Taxonomy, evolution, chemistry, all can be traced back at a molecular level with the many DNA analysis that are currently available. And plants have hidden micro-morphological universes that are equally important and resourceful to humankind.
We are also a green Noah’s Ark that sails on the time making sure that there is a back-up of everything that seems to be disappearing, if given a chance. Be it in our glasshouses or the Millennium Seed Bank. This makes Kew to be one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, even if artificially maintained.
We are a part of history and a world heritage site. It’s a lovely place, a great venue too. It is also an incredible education facility and, after all, one of the best gardens on the planet. ‘All along the Pagoda tower’: we are a botanical town in the middle of an all-so buzzing London. You can come with a blanket and a picnic basket and enjoy the sun and the birds singing if none of the above mentioned items capture your attention or interest. At the end of the day, we are a great resource to humankind at both collective and individual levels.
However, here comes the rant: many take all this for granted, all the research which is going on, all the up keeping with the heritage site and gardening icon/flagship and all the education and conservation that is being carried out. At the moment we are having a hard time getting society to pay us back.
What do you hope to achieve as this ‘plant messiah’ – as this activist – with this beautiful backdrop of Kew gardens, what is your legacy?
Stopping a single extinction would be an achievement and I guess I have contributed to do that at least temporarily. While this is not enough by any means, I hope this has demonstrated that something can be done and more importantly inspires others, especially the junior generations which are likely to be more exposed to video games than tadpoles and zebras.
I’m partially in debt to people like David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau, Konrad Lorenz, Gerall Durell, or the not so well known out Spain, Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente. They fascinated me when I was a kid and I was always saying, ‘I want to be like them when I grow up’. So if I could achieve and deposit a grain of sand to what they have achieved towards influencing other people, I would be a happy man. The trouble is that most of our nature legends do not have next generational replacements lined up, despite having inspired legions of us. We need more people doing exactly that, following up and expanding the pioneering work they did and still do. Addressing the challenges that the natural world faces at present, it is not going to require one or two people but swarms of motivated individuals.
1
The Life of Brian
I feel this movie explains a lot about us.
2
Waterlillies
I love it. It’s omnipresent in history, from Egyptians to Aztecs, from Buddah to Monet. They are also it’s also one of the earliest lineages of flowering plants so that’s your bit of ‘scientific interest’ and they are simply beautiful. And quite philosophical: ‘As a lotus flower is born in water, grows in water and rises out of water to stand above it unsoiled, so I, born in the world, raised in the world having overcome the world, live unsoiled by the world’ (Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.)
3
Asturias, Spain
This place is half way between Seville and Edinburgh, at all levels, not only geographically speaking, but also culturally, as Spaniard living in the UK, it does define me quite well.
The ‘plant messiah’ on what it takes to save the world’s rarest species
And why plant conservation is like codebreaking
By Angela Chen@chengela Mar 30, 2018, 4:13pm EDT
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Photo by Alessandra Potenza / The Verge
A fifth of all the world’s plants are in danger of extinction, and Carlos Magdalena is traveling the world to save them. Magdalena, a botanical horticulturist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is popularly known as the “plant messiah.” He’s gone to countries like Australia, Peru, and Mauritius to find the world’s endangered species and learn how to cultivate them before they go extinct.
Magdalena’s memoir, aptly titled The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species, will be out from Doubleday on April 10. The Verge spoke to Magdalena about the importance of plant conservation, why he considers himself a “codebreaker,” and what it takes to save the plants.
The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
How did you first become interested in horticulture?
Photo: Courtesy Doubleday
My mother was a florist, so I was always interested in the plant world. And as I grew up, I realized that plants are really important and they are massively neglected by conservationists in contrast to animals. I realized that if you work with plants, you have many more species and you can maybe contribute a bit more than if you were focusing on animals.
As part of your work, I’m sure you’re always educating people about plants. What surprises people most about them?
Most people don’t realize how clever the plants are! They don’t know about the tricks that plants can do. There are ones that live in the water and look passive, but pull animals toward them to help pollinate them. Plants can detect drought. Just yesterday I received seeds from a type of sacred lotus that were 3,000 years old.
And people don’t realize how endangered plants are. There are so many plants where there are only 10 of them left — when there are only 10 animals left, we know, we’re calling for the funeral. There are 80,000 types of plants that are endangered, and to avoid the extinction of these 80,000, I need to cultivate them. So my work is about finding out the right way — the easiest, reliable way — of getting a plant to grow. Then, once it grows, will it bloom? Will it pollinate? Will it germinate?
In the book, you call yourself a “codebreaker.” Why is that? What are the similarities between what you do and codebreaking?
Well, to make a plant germinate, you need to make things happen in the right order and with a kind of consistency. It’s like baking a cake. Imagine somebody gives you a piece of cake and you don’t know know the ingredients and steps but you have to recreate it. That’s what I mean by “cracking the code.”
When you germinate a seed, you need to start to make decisions immediately. Different plant species will have very different requirements. There are so many protocols that you need to figure out. You can have seeds, and you don’t even know what they are, and you need to deduce that — figure it out from the climate of where they were growing. There are cases where you grow a plant that hasn’t been seen for 60 years. How do you know what it is? Is it a new species?
And you need to try a lot of different things. For example, some seeds from South Africa need to be exposed to chemicals present in smoke to germinate. But some seeds cannot be dry at all because if you dry them you will kill them. Which is which? If one method doesn’t work, what are you going to do next? You always need to be thinking and using logic and figure out what you need to do. Plants can’t speak to you or answer your questions.
Tell me about these protocols. Can you give me some examples? Is there technology you use?
It’s more about trying to test things than relying on advanced technology, and sometimes very small changes with a plant make a big difference. In one case, it was about exposure to air. We tried all these different things for the plant, like working with different pH in the soil, but eventually we realized that it needed a high concentration of carbon dioxide. Sometimes the actions that lead to cultivation are very simple things, but you need to find the one simple thing which fixes the problem out of the one thousand or two thousand possible variables.
Another example is that there is a plant that often develops a spider mite, and no matter how many times you spray it with chemicals, the mites will return and you can’t save it. I see it all the time, and in that case, you have to try different things, like moving it to a cooler temperature.
What other skills are needed for this type of work?
Well, clearly a basic knowledge of ecology and plant growth, but also, you need to be very observant and have a good memory.
Sometimes, if I wait a week to see a plant, I’ll see a massive difference from the last time. But if I leave at 7 o’clock tonight and come back tomorrow morning, there will be less of a difference. So when you are working, you need to remember what this plant was like two weeks ago and have a mental image of it: how it looked then and now, the positioning of leaves, and so on. That way, you can remember and start to see patterns. It’s like how sometimes you look at a person and even when they are not smiling, you can conclude that they are happy or sad. Maybe a few times over a month you may be able to see a pattern. Maybe the plant’s pissed off whenever it’s cold and rainy.
What do we lose when plant species die out?
From the philosophical point of view, plants have a right to exist and some plants have been here for 100 million years. From a more practical standpoint, plants are vital to us and to the ecosystem. You never know which plant you’re going to need, a plant that we don’t have a use for now could be key to the future, and plant that is used a lot today might not be used in a few year’s time. And they have quite a lot of tricks, in ways we can’t even imagine. We don’t yet know the consequences of losing them.
Saving the world one plant at a time in 'The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species' by Carlos Magdalena
By WILLY BLACKMORE
APR 06, 2018 | 8:00 AM
Saving the world one plant at a time in 'The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species' by Carlos Magdalena
Carlos Magdalena, author of "The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species." (David Levene/eyevine/Redux)
The tiny islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues, which sit in an otherwise empty stretch of the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, share a notorious distinction in the world of conservation: home to at least 30 native plant species that have stopped reproducing in the wild, they are considered "islands of the living dead." Uninhabited for millions of years, the islands and their unique flora — and the host of animals, many of them similarly rare, that their ecosystems support — have been decimated by human activity since a succession of Portuguese, Dutch and French colonists began living on the islands around 1600. Forests were cleared for farms; invasive species like pigs and guavas were introduced and have now also colonized large swaths of the islands.
It's on Rodrigues that Carlos Magdalena opens his new memoir, "The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species." Magdalena, a senior botanical horticulturist at London's Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, introduces readers to one of the island's zombie plants, the café marron: a small, glossy-leaved tree that's continuously covered with tiny white flowers. Long believed to be extinct, a single living specimen was discovered in the 1980s and quickly became a destination for both curious tourists and locals seeking it out as a folk remedy for hangovers and venereal disease. After the tree was hacked down to a stump in the middle of the night a fence was erected, and then a fence around the fence. "After millions of years of freedom, the last plant in the wild had to be caged to protect it from humans," Magdalena writes.
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“The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species” by Carlos Magdalena
“The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species” by Carlos Magdalena (Doubleday)
The stump resprouted and one piece was carefully cut off in order to ensure the species' survival. It was whisked away to Kew, where the cutting was grown into new plants (as is the case with many trees and woody shrubs, cuttings can sprout roots, creating clones of the plant they were taken from), giving the café marron a lifeline — but not a future. The plants tended to at Kew as well as those that were eventually reintroduced to the wild still did not set fruit and produce seeds. The café marron trees Kew returned to Rodrigues were "an ever-blooming reminder of what had been lost, nothing more than hopeless cases sentenced to life imprisonment, captive in cages." That is, they would have been if it weren't for Magdalena.
Trochetia boutoniana is the national flower of Mauritius, from "The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species" by Carlos Magdalena.
Trochetia boutoniana is the national flower of Mauritius, from "The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species" by Carlos Magdalena. (Carlos Magdalena)
Growing up in the Asturias in northwestern Spain, Magdalena helped his parents care for the finca they farmed, and his mom taught him about the plants that grew wild in the mountains and valleys that survived Franco's push to squeeze profit out of all Spanish land. When he landed an internship at Kew in 2003, he by no means had the credentials to work at one of the world's best botanical gardens in the world — but he was passionate and he could grow anything, including, eventually, the café marron. Since then, Magdalena has played a key role in helping to conserve a number of dramatically endangered species, like a lobelia flower that would have gone extinct were it not for some seeds that stuck to the glue on an envelope, and another Mauritian species known as "the loneliest palm tree on the planet."
Just as it opens on an island wrecked by colonialism, the Eurocentrism of botanical horticulture and its attendant problems are discussed throughout "The Plant Messiah." After an endangered water lily is stolen from Kew, Magdalena reflects on the complicated notion of ownership of wild species, noting that in 1876 the gardens bought smuggled rubber-tree seeds from Henry Wickham, who was known in Brazil both as the Prince of Thieves and the Executioner of the Amazon. Other white collectors, including Joseph Dalton Hooker — "one of Kew's most celebrated directors," according to Magdalena — took plants freely from around the world, building both the collections at gardens like Kew and personal fortunes by introducing exotic trees, flowers and shrubs into the nursery trade.
Crocuses bloom at The Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, where Magdalena is a senior botanical horticulturist
Crocuses bloom at The Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, where Magdalena is a senior botanical horticulturist (Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images)
Today, Magdalena and his colleagues are more cautious about making endangered plants available to commercial growers, and will only do so when the community a given species originated from is paid a kind of royalty to support continued conservation efforts. Even still, "The Plant Messiah" contains very few moments in which indigenous knowledge informs conservation efforts. Instead, information flows from Kew to the locals, such as when Magdalena and his colleagues teach people in rural Bolivia how to propagate Brazil nut trees from cuttings (foraging for the nuts, which only grow in the wild, is a major source of income in some parts of the country). In other instances, locals are seen outright harming the endangered species they live alongside: snacking on the seeds of a rare palm that were destined for Kew, for example, or weeding the seedlings of another nearly extinct palm out of the flower bed planted under its shade.
A Puya raimondii flowering stalk after being burned. The person on the right can give you an idea of the sheer size of "The Queen of the Andes." Image from "The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species."
A Puya raimondii flowering stalk after being burned. The person on the right can give you an idea of the sheer size of "The Queen of the Andes." Image from "The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species." (Carlos Magdalena)
Questions of representation aside, for an avowed plant geek it is fascinating to follow Magdalena as he travels from remote Australian billabongs full of rare water lilies to the dry forests of western Peru, where the last gnarled huarango trees grow in the shadow of the Andes. But the greater accomplishment of "The Plant Messiah" is the compelling case that Magdalena makes from caring about plants in general. When shown a picture of a monkey in a rainforest, he writes, people see the animal but not the host of plant species that support its existence. Such an image doesn't just show a mammal, according to Magdalena — rather, it's a depiction of biodiversity. With an estimated one out of five plant species threatened with extinction, Magdelena argues that all species must be protected. "I believe that every species has a right to live without justifying its existence and should not be wiped out by recklessness or economic interest..." he writes. "Destroy one species and you give yourself permission to destroy them all."
Blackmore, who writes about food, culture and the environment, is an editor for Popula, a publication launching later this year.
Carlos Magdalena examines nymphaea thermarum, the smallest known species of waterlily in the world.
Carlos Magdalena examines nymphaea thermarum, the smallest known species of waterlily in the world. (Carlos Magdalena)
"The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species"
Carlos Magdalena
Doubleday: 272 pp., $26.95
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Copyright © 2018, Los Angeles Times
The gospel of bark; Botany
The Economist. 423.9044 (June 10, 2017): p82(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
WITH his long brown locks and his knack for rescuing rare flora from extinction, it is easy to see why Carlos Magdalena has come to be known as "the plant messiah". A botanical horticulturalist at Kew Gardens in London, he denies having a messiah complex. But his book, which tells of his efforts to track down and revive long-lost species, suggests otherwise.
Growing up in Spain as the son of a florist, Mr Magdalena's ability to nurture wildlife was his "miracle of the loaves and fishes". In his 30s he won an internship at Kew, where a "sixth sense" for breeding dying plants attracted interest and scepticism. Even after he saved several doomed species, "some people still did not believe the good news". In recent years he has been sent around the world to train other gardeners--or rather, "disciples".
Yet Mr Magdalena's claim to be a green-fingered Jesus has its merits. His record of propagating plants that others have consigned to botanical history is impressive. The most gripping passages are about his work with the last remnants of a species--a handful of seeds glued to an envelope or a plant discovered living in a single bubbling spring. He draws on his years as a waiter for similes: watering Kew's trees is like being a sommelier; the beetles that pollinate Amazonian waterlilies are like revellers flitting between nightclubs.
The botany can get thorny, with descriptions of stamens, stigmas and styles (and a rap on the knuckles for readers who were "daydreaming during biology"). The author comes across as passionate but prickly, with little time for bunglers. His gospel, however, is important. A fifth of plants face extinction. They feed people, clothe them, heal them and produce the oxygen they breathe. Some 30,000 plants have recorded uses for humans. Most people, the messiah preaches, are blind to these everyday miracles. This book will teach them to see.
The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species.
By Carlos Magdalena.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The gospel of bark; Botany." The Economist, 10 June 2017, p. 82(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494897690/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=34876d2c. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494897690
6/3/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search
of the World's Rarest Species
Alan Moores
Booklist.
114.12 (Feb. 15, 2018): p4.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species.
By Carlos Magdalena.
Apr. 2018.272p. illus. Doubleday, $26.95 (97803855436131.333.95.
Magdalena is a senior botanical horticulturist at Kew Gardens, tasked with discovering and propagating rare
plant species around the world. And so readers join him on tiny Rodrigues Island, 350. miles east of
Mauritius, to examine the native cafe marron tree--thought to be extinct until discovered by a schoolboy
there in 1979, and miraculously propagated from seed by Magdalena some 20 years later. There are treks to
the Amazon rain forest and to northeast Australia in search of rare waterlilies, the author's passion; to
Bolivia to help locals propagate Brazil nuts outside their native habitat (not easy); and to coastal Peru to
create "seed balls" to restore native forests there. To anyone questioning the practical value of the author's
singular energy and focus on such rare and remote plants, Magdalena offers Nymphaea thermarum, a
waterlily found in Rwanda that no one before 1980 knew existed. Turns out its properties make it the rare
"dream genetic model" for invaluable horticultural research. A book that will inspire wonder, even hope.--
Alan Moores
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Moores, Alan. "The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species." Booklist, 15 Feb.
2018, p. 4. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531171464/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a4dd9ce4. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531171464
6/3/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Magdalena, Carlos: THE PLANT
MESSIAH
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Magdalena, Carlos THE PLANT MESSIAH Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 4, 10 ISBN: 978-0-385-
54361-3
The Tropical Senior Botanical Horticulturist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, records with
enthusiasm his attempts to rescue as many plants as possible from extinction.
Raised in rural Spain by a gardening-obsessed mother who taught him the names of hundreds of plants,
Magdalena moved to England in his 20s, initially working as a waiter and sommelier. Fascinated by the
gardens at Kew, he talked himself into an internship there and then was accepted into their rigorous threeyear
Diploma in Horticulture program, after which he was offered a job at the gardens. In his first book,
Magdalena details his trips to many parts of the world and the rare plants he helped the locals preserve or
brought back to the gardens to attempt to propagate. In Australia, he lurched through mud, avoiding
crocodiles, to get a desirable specimen. In Peru, he chewed more coca leaves than was perhaps advisable
and bounced "from rock to rock and plant to plant, jabbering with delight." The author is clearly as excited
about playing in dirt or water back in England as he is about dodging predators in exotic locales, and he
effectively communicates the thrill of figuring out how to get an especially recalcitrant plant to reproduce.
Magdalena has a particular passion for waterlilies, and his tales of procuring species for the huge ponds at
Kew ring with delight. Illustrations would have been useful, since, though the author describes the key
features of the plants, most of them will be unfamiliar to general readers. If the details of the plants don't
come through vividly, Magdalena's mission certainly does, and the glossary is helpful. "I will not tolerate
extinction," he writes, nor "thuggish invasive species...bullying" native plants into submission.
Magdalena's excitement about plants and their propagation is contagious, and even those lacking green
thumbs should be fascinated by his travels and adventures in science.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Magdalena, Carlos: THE PLANT MESSIAH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527247907/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=11f055c1.
Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527247907
6/3/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search
of the World's Rarest Species
Publishers Weekly.
265.1 (Jan. 1, 2018): p48.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species
Carlos Magdalena. Doubleday, $26.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-385-54361-3
With evident passion for endangered and common plant species alike, Magdalena, tropical senior botanical
horticulturist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in England, shares his experiences traveling the world in
his quest to save plant species before they go extinct. Magdalena details his exploits in a wide array of
environments--including the Mascarene Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, the desert of Peru, the Amazonian
region of Bolivia, and the Australian outback--while demonstrating the critical role plants play in all facets
of human life. He consistently discusses the need for conservation efforts and says that he wants people "to
understand the importance of plants so much that we are moved to do something about it." Balancing the
excitement of fleldwork with the rigors of plant propagation, Magdalena works to find new strategies for
germinating seeds from plants that are on the brink of extinction and to keep the last seedlings of a species
alive. He is equally articulate about the role that institutions such as Kew play in global conservation
efforts, both by growing and preserving plants, as well as through education efforts in all corners of the
world. Magdalenas paean to flora is bound to enthrall readers and get them thinking more fully about plants.
(Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species." Publishers Weekly, 1 Jan. 2018,
p. 48. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522125006/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c0ae0f53. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A522125006