.png)
4 days ago
5
The Codonopsis clematidea smells like a skunk, the Tulipa toktogulica has a peculiar, elongated bulb and the Fritillaria imperialis is exceptionally tall. But to the horticulturalists who journeyed to remote alpine meadows and forests to find these rare flowers growing in the wild this year, they are nothing less than the “jewels of the earth”.
Now, the seeds from these and hundreds of other wild plants that were collected in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan have entered the living collections at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.
After sending its horticulturalists on plant-collecting expeditions abroad, where they collaborated with local botanists to locate and sustainably harvest native flora, London’s Kew Gardens has managed to add more than 300 seeds for rare wild plants to its living collections this year.
It is the single biggest introduction of wild plants to Kew’s living collections in the past decade.
“Having living specimens in the collection is really important,” said Dr Ilia Leitch, a plant geneticist at Kew. “Many of the analyses to identify plants with new bioactive compounds that can be used as medicines can only be done on living plants, because some chemicals in plants are not particularly stable when you dry them out. So living plants enable you to pick up on things you might miss in dried specimens.”
Kew’s plant specialists are still working to identify all the different rare species collected in Kyrgyzstan – this process is likely to take years, since some plants must be fully grown to be classified. As many as 10 to 15 could belong to new species not yet known to western scientists.
“If they’ve never been studied before, you just don’t know what new treasures they hold for science, and for humanity,” Leitch said, adding that biochemical analysis of living plants can reveal properties which may be of medicinal value for sufferers of inflammation, dementia or even cancer.
“Plants produce different chemicals in different parts of the plant, where they serve different functions. For example, in the leaf, the plant might produce a chemical to stop the leaf being eaten, while in the flower, it produces a scent and different colours,” Leitch said.
Kew is already running a project which aims to use AI to predict which plant species contain molecules with pharmaceutical potential for malaria.
The desire to find such “new treasures for science” is one of the reasons why botanic gardens like Kew are looking to expand their living collections by funding plant collecting expeditions. “With a whole plant that’s growing, you can analyse the roots, stem, leaves and flowers,” said Leitch.
The DNA of a living plant can also be extracted “in the most perfect way” to sequence its genome and look at its evolution and the genes underpinning metabolic pathways, she added. “We can’t do top quality sequencing except by harvesting material from a living plant.”
There are also pressing conservation reasons to carry out plant-collecting expeditions. As global temperatures rise, alpine plants – which need cooler climates to thrive – are facing decline, so collecting endangered species, like the wild tulips which grow on the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, is now a race against time.
“Many of the species we’ve collected may already be at risk of extinction – but, by being able to collect seeds and then grow the plants at Kew and other botanic gardens, they are preserved. And so is their long term future survival,” said Leitch.
after newsletter promotion
Living plant collections are important not only for conservationists and scientists today, but for future generations who may be able to use the plants to make a scientific breakthrough that is unimaginable right now, she said: “We don’t know what new techniques for studying plants are just around the corner.”
Botanical horticulturist Millie Woodley collected 209 of the new seeds that have entered Kew’s living collection on a month-long expedition to Kyrgyzstan, which was led by a team from Cambridge Botanic Gardens. “Almost every day, we set up a new camp at the base of mountains that we would climb the next day – and woke to incredible views,” the 22-year-old said, adding that the trip was the toughest thing she had ever done. “And I’d do it again.”
About 93% of Kyrgyzstan lies 1,000m above sea level. “What makes these mountainous regions so exciting is the way the habitats and the plants change. You go from semi-desert to a juniper forest to a high alpine meadow. It felt like we were crossing into different worlds, where every day, every population of plants was different,” she said.
She compared collecting seeds to finding the jewels of the earth. “It was so exciting not knowing what we were going to come across.”
Now, she is on tenterhooks to see what will grow from everything she brought back. The first bloom of the Tulipa toktogulica, an extremely rare wild tulip species which Cambridge scientists officially described for the first time in 2022, will be particularly thrilling, but she also collected wild roses, honeysuckle and rare alliums. “The goal is eventually to have some of them actually planted in the garden and on display to the public.”
