A Schefflera plant, shown in its native habitat on New Caledonia, an island in the South Pacific
In 1912, the eminent horticulturalist Harry James Veitch helped move the Royal Horticultural Society’s Great Spring Show to the Chelsea section of London, where his family’s famous nursery firm, James Veitch & Sons, was headquartered. The show was thereafter known as the Chelsea Flower Show, an annual event that is considered the world’s most famous horticultural exhibition. But while Harry was busy running the family firm, his brother John Gould Veitch was one of a select group of Victorian explorers who traveled the world seeking new plants to bring into cultivation.
One of these plants was Aralia elegantissima, which was first introduced to the world during the Great Spring Show of 1873. Since then, it’s been called by many other names, including Dizygotheca elegantissima, Schefflera elegantissima, and Plerandra elegantissima. As the common element in those names suggests, its leaves are “most elegant,” with slender, dark-green and smartly toothed leaflets, not unlike those of Cannabis. As it turns out, wild populations of this “False Aralia” are entirely restricted to the South Pacific island of New Caledonia, where Veitch originally discovered it. Today, it’s widely cultivated as a “tropical foliage plant,” gracing shopping centers and fast-food restaurants from New York to London to Tokyo. John Veitch would be duly proud of the success of his introduction. Unfortunately, the plant has not fared as well in its native New Caledonia, where it is on the brink of extinction due to habitat loss.
What a pleasure it is to stroll through The New York Botanical Garden, especially during springtime. The landscape varies from hills to low places, from exposed vistas to the isolation of the ancient Thain Family Forest. Then there are the textures: deep rich soils, jagged bark, scoured bedrock outcroppings, and wide flat lawns. And throughout this season, it has been impossible to ignore an explosion of color—carpets of yellow daffodils, spires of white magnolias and pink cherries, and the deep purples of grape hyacinths—all set against the backdrop of the vibrant spring-greens of the renewed trees and grasses. Simply amazing.
But there’s more than one way to look at the Botanical Garden and the beauty of the plant world. In part, that’s what the Garden’s scientists do every day.
To understand this better, consider what it is like to stroll through a great art museum, such as the Louvre in Paris. Like the Garden, the Louvre is filled with great treasures for the eyes. The museum itself provides the great landscape, through which we can appreciate the various textures, ranging from the hard stone of Greco-Roman statues to the soft canvases of Renaissance paintings, the pliable wood of native arts, and the smooth, rich gold of the decorative arts. And like spring in the Garden, the museum is ablaze with color. In each gallery, we can experience this variety in landscape, texture, and color on a purely aesthetic level—truly one of life’s great pleasures.
Carrots and their wild relatives, Queen Anne’s Lace, are a familiar part of our life, whether at the green-grocer or along summer-time roadsides. But the carrot family (Umbelliferae) is a huge group of nearly 4,000 species, including many familiar sources of food, spices, and medicines, such as parsnips, celery, parsley, fennel, dill, caraway, cilantro, coriander, and anise. Most are found in northern temperate areas of Eurasia and North America, but there is a smaller subgroup of the carrot family centered in the Andean region of South America, extending from the alpine páramos of Colombia and Venezuela to the cold, windswept grasslands of Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile and Argentina.
Gregory M. Plunkett, Ph.D., is Director and Curator of the Cullman Program for Molecular Systematics at The New York Botanical Garden. Michael J. Balick, Ph.D., is the Vice President for Botanical Science and Director and Philecology Curator of the Botanical Garden’s Institute of Economic Botany.
Dr. Gregory Plunkett pressing plants in a Palauan rainforest.
A month ago, one of the deadliest typhoons in recorded history ripped through the western Pacific on a collision course with the Philippines, where it took the lives of nearly 6,000 people after it made landfall on November 8. On its way, Super Typhoon Haiyan battered the Pacific island nation of Palau, where we and two local researchers were studying the flora of this remote archipelago as part of The New York Botanical Garden’s long-term commitment to the botany of the region.
It’s hard to conceive of a bright side to the devastation and suffering left in the wake of Haiyan, but our team managed to put the storm’s enormous power to some good use. Our arrival in Palau (also known as Belau and comprising over 250 islands) preceded Haiyan’s by just three days. We were joined by Ann Kitalong and Van Ray Tadao, two researchers from the Belau National Museum, to document the flora of some of the country’s least known forest habitats on the main island of Babeldaob and to continue working on a book that will document Palau’s ethnobotany, the second in a series of volumes examining the relationship between plants and people in Micronesia.
