'That was in the middle of a wilderness in the Northern Cape, and all we had was a rough map and a sketch of saddle between two hillocks.' For the quest, he enlisted the help of Priscilla Burgoyne of the National Herbarium in Pretoria, one of only three experts in the world who would be able to identify it. Travelling nearly 1,000 miles, they searched for two weeks. 'But it turned out that the map had confused north and south,' said Smith, 'and we'd all but given up when we spotted two hillocks. Priscilla was tremendously excited. This was the family she'd spent her whole career on, but she'd never seen this particular plant.
'Even in 1960 it hadn't been thriving, and all we found, there in the shale, were 47 plants, half of them dead and the rest in a terrible state.' But this is what we'd come to the glasshouse in West Sussex to see - grown from the seed Smith had collected, thriving Cylindrophyllum hallii, more than 100 specimens. Hello, hallii! 'At least now,' he said, 'we have an option on its future. When we found them they were rarer than pandas.''Have you ever been in a room with four raving egotists before?' asked Michael Way when introducing himself and his three seed hunter colleagues at Wakehurst Place. That was practically the last I saw of Way, but you can understand it. One of the chief architects of MSBP strategy, he's now the seed hunter for the Americas, with a brief that includes Mexico, Chile, Argentina and the entire US. Jobs don't come any bigger. Just one project task in North America is to collect at least half the species from the vast Midwest prairie.
The seed hunter with the toughest job, however, is Michiel van Slageren, whose bailiwick includes North and West Africa and the Middle East. Worldly and shrewd, with a Dutch drawl, van Slageren might have stepped out of a Graham Greene novel. Formerly Kew's man in South Africa, his previous experience covered most points between Morocco and Pakistan. For the MSBP, he was given the 'ground-zero' task of developing partnerships with those countries - a couple rich, mostly poor - with the least seed-banking experience, trained personnel or legal frameworks for doing the job.
'About the most difficult,' he says, 'is the Yemen - politically unstable, hijackings, no economic reserves. They only seed-bank for agricultural or horticultural plants, and there are no red lists of threatened species. So you just have to find your way.' Anomaly and confusion abound. 'In Jordan, they're still having to use the flora [record] of Palestine. In some countries I don't even have a counterpart. In Lebanon they have no seed-banking facility, and Saudi Arabia's is still rudimentary. So for both countries we're holding their seeds in trust.'But Saudi, thanks to a feisty British woman, Sheila Collenette, is well served for flora. Married to an oilman, she spent 25 years flying around in his helicopter, photographing and recording the flora in what's now a 41/2-kilo [10lb] pictorial atlas that's just in its second edition. She did the lot, including threatened species. Wonderful! Except you have to go out and relocate them.'
Differently again, Burkina Faso, in West Africa, had a reasonably well-developed seed-collecting programme, but solely for commercial trees and shrubs. Needing to start somewhere, van Slageren hooked up with foresters. 'They sell seeds, of course, and they had a seed list and some priority settings. So I was able to say, 'How about also collecting herbal specimens, grasses and annuals to conserve them?' They're better informed than your average botanist and, luckily, with us paying for a driver there, they've bought into the project.'On his particular patch, van Slageren says that conservation consciousness is developing slowly. 'Some countries don't see that things become extinct because of their way of life. And the richer they are, because they can buy everything else, they think can buy conservation. But the awareness is coming. Not just because of me!' he laughed. 'The 1992 CBD was a real watershed.' But even of the most behindhand countries in his charge, he says, 'Give me five years, and they'll have seed-banking operations we can all be proud of.'Chiefly because of Kew's long relationship with South Africa, the MSBP's programme there is the most advanced. 'But we're not just banking seeds in order to forget about them for the next 200 years,' said Paul Smith. He's a little ticked off, as are his project colleagues. 'The Noah's Ark thing is by no means all we do,' said Tim Pearce. Nor do they care much for doom-sayers. 'Of course, it would be nice if Kew could save the world by carpet-bombing it with herbarium specimens,' said Roger Smith, whose sense of irony is deeper than the Wakehurst bunker. 'Even so, as a millennial project conceived in optimism, the great thing about it is that it enables so many people to get out there and do something of real value.'
A case in point is the work in progress in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal. Nine out of 10 of the top utilitarian plants there are threatened, mainly because of their overuse in treating HIV and Aids, of which KwaZulu-Natal has one of the highest rates in the world.'As well as the belief in the efficacy of these plants,' the seed hunter Smith explained, 'the other pressure on them is economic. Because these people cannot afford to travel to clinics, let alone buy treatment, they go to local healers who go into the bush to collect the plants. There's a terrific turnover in usage, species to species, because they're not very efficacious. The hypoxis, the so-called African potato, has been stripped from vast areas of southern and central Africa to meet the demand. So the idea now is to use seeds from those plants to overcome the threat of their extinction. That means reintroducing species and developing the horticultural protocols that will enable these species to be grown out of their natural habitat. Botanic gardens and nature reserves have an increasing role to play here.'
But in South Africa they're beginning to complete the circle. 'Right now,' says Smith, 'the Silver Glen Nature Reserve in Durban is developing propagation protocols for those medicinal species, enabling them to grow the plants and supply them to the local healers.' At the same time, the MSBP's chief partner in South Africa, the National Botanical Institute, has developed a strategy for reintroducing the plants into the wild. A few so-called recalcitrant species have so far proven nigh on impossible either to germinate or to propagate or to freeze-store. To tackle these problems, the MSBP is sponsoring two master's students at Durban university. 'So now,' says Smith, banging home the point, 'we're not just operating a seed museum.'The world has certainly turned since Kew was pre-eminent in the business of plant piracy. Beginning in the 18th century, it sent plant hunters all over the globe to appropriate economic species, and even to help extend the pink bits on the map. Sir Joseph Banks, the first of the modern plant hunters, stepped ashore in Australia alongside Captain Cook. The discovery of Himalayan rhododendrons resulted in the kingdom of Sikkim being annexed to the British empire. And Kew's second attempt to take breadfruit from Tahiti to feed slaves in the West Indian colonies was the very subplot of the mutiny on the bounty. Tea, rubber, cinchona (quinine), flax: all and more pinched from here and there and developed as plantations wherever best suited imperialist expansionism.
Today, Kew's unimpeachable reputation is in good part based on its decades-long adherence to the principle of prior informed consent from any country it collects in. In MSBP terms, that also obliges anyone wishing commercially to exploit collected species to deal direct with the country of origin. The nature of partnership has also changed. 'It used to mean little more than buying overseas workers their lunch and maybe sticking one of their names on a scientific paper,' said Tim Pearce. 'Not any more, thank God.' Currently, Pearce is negotiating the MSBP's partnership with India, which is yet to enact the key legislation. Meanwhile, since Kew knows more about India's flora than India does itself, its archives are being copied over into India's databases.
That the MSBP has training and equipment monies to spend certainly oils the wheels of partnership. But it's Kew's status as the world's foremost botanic garden that has the power to change hearts and minds. Close to home, take the phenomenally successful Eden Project, which is building a new biome for dry-land species. Not missing a trick, the MSBP recently buttonholed the Eden folk to suggest that they cease collecting live plants from the wild and, instead, grow them from seed and develop their own germination and propagation strategies. To be tough about it, the Eden Project's evolution from a plant zoo to a proactive conservation reserve would do wonders for the take-home message.The MSBP, in daring to imagine a viable future for our planet, is already addressing old, apparently intractable problems in new ways. Chief of these is its firm grasp of the dynamic link between the conservation of biodiversity and sustainable development. Or as Pearce puts it, not least on behalf of the bare-subsistence peoples of the dry- land areas: 'My passion is plant biodiversity as a means of alleviating poverty.'
MSBP people refer to this devoutly-to-be-wished prospect as 'the big win-win'. But let Pearce explain it: 'In international development, which is my background, we were always struggling to make the link between conservation of the world-wildlife cuddly-penguin sort and development, which traditionally was about introducing new crops. On one hand, you had the environmental beatniks saying, 'Save the forest!' and on the other, the agriculturalists arguing, 'Well, no, we must get rid of the forest in order to introduce high-yield maize to feed the people.' But amazingly, in my lifetime I've seen those two backgrounds come together. In the past we've stuck to a narrow range of species. Of the hundreds of thousands of plants in the world, we've only cultivated... what is it, 200-odd? And just three - wheat, rice and maize - account for over 50% of the world's plant-derived protein.'But in the case of, say, the Kenyan farmer, there's a different range of other plant species without which the local economies would be severely compromised. That's basic foodstuffs, plus wild foods and even famine foods; that's building materials, fuel wood and medicines, and other plants with a cultural significance - the equivalent of our bluebell wood. All these have inherent value to people, plus there's the ecological services these plants provide: maintaining water catchments, soil stability, supporting the animals and insects that work as pollinators, and so on.' Which is a perfect definition of biodiversity. 'The trick, then, is for us to help to manage all these resources better, satisfying local need, while at the same time meeting our conservation requirements.'
One example is fuel wood in rural Africa, where wood provides more than 90% of cooking and heating fuel. Millions of people buy or chop down up to a ton of firewood each, every year. 'So what can be done?' asks Pearce. 'Well, the MSBP holds one of the largest genetic-resource collections of fuel-wood trees - ones that grow more quickly, burn slowly and could be used sustainably. Ideal for Africa's deforested areas.'
But the examples are as endless as the range of dry-land plants - foods, flowers, medicines, agro-forestry materials, cosmetic oils and scents - that are either disappearing for want of seed-technology know-how, or are under threat because of unsustainable use, or both.
Consider the famously medicinal tree Prunus africana. Although widespread across Africa, it grows in sparse clumps only, and you rarely see a young tree. 'For years now,' said Pearce, 'its bark has been stripped and sold wholesale to a French pharmaceutical company that uses it, very profitably, to research and treat prostate cancer.' But such has been its over-exploitation in Africa, the tree is at serious risk. 'What's needed,' he added, 'is to get that tree into a Kenyan-run agro-forestry setup. You can't store the seeds of Prunus africana for long periods of time. But our seed biologists are already working on it, and it has terrific potential for farmers to set up a new economy, growing and processing in Kenya, adding value and developing it sustainably as their own export.
'Or take aloe vera,' said Pearce, barely getting into his stride. 'There's an illegitimate trade of aloe resin out of Kenya. Again, we could help here. We've done the seed work. So instead of poor people chopping bits off aloes and the resin being shipped off to wherever it's processed, we could show the Kenyans how easy it is to grow them from seed, how to set up aloe plantations, how to exploit them sustainably.'Another case is the African violet. Grown all over the world, it sells in millions. But in Africa, where it came from, it's barely hanging on.'
It's not Kew's or the MSBP's role to work directly with farmers or foresters. Nor should Kew, Pearce says, attempt an old-fashioned top-down imposition of crop policies. 'That wouldn't work. But we have a priceless baton of knowledge to pass on. So the second phase of our project - and in Kenya we're just moving into it - will be about recognising that we need new partners, an interface between us and the farmers, foresters, land managers, all the end-users. Ideally, these would be community-based agencies, who can have their farm open days and deliver information, fact sheets, and training courses on how to collect and promote these seeds, these plants, this great potential wealth.
'Everyone involved approaches it from different backgrounds. But at the end you come to the same win-win: biodiversity coupled with sustainable exploitation.'
Or you might say that when you've seen one Prunus africana, you've seen the future.
