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A favorite book of mine, one of a delightful series (‘Britain in Pictures’) published during the Second World War, was British Botanists by John Gilmour. Gilmour gives a particularly vivid and moving portrait of Joseph Hooker as a grand botanical explorer and investigator, as the son of his renowned botanist father, William Jackson Hooker (who after his years teaching in Glasgow became the first director of Kew Gardens) – and above all, in his relationship with Darwin:
‘You are the one living soul from whom I have constantly received sympathy’ Darwin wrote to him. From the time when [Hooker] slept with the proofs of the Voyage of the Beagle under his pillow so as to read them the moment he woke up, to the day when he helped to bear Darwin’s pall to its last resting place in the Abbey, [he] was Darwin’s closest and most frequent confidant. It was to Hooker that Darwin, in 1844, sent the first hint of his theory of natural selection and, fifteen years later, Hooker was his first convert. In 1858, when Darwin received one morning from Alfred Russel Wallace an essay setting out the identical theory of natural selection which he himself was about to publish, it was Hooker, overruling Darwin’s quixotic desire to resign his undoubted priority to Wallace, who arranged for the famous double communication of the theory to be read at the Linnaean Society. And at the centenary of Darwin’s birth in 1909, Hooker, then 92, his tall figure still full of vigour, was present at Cambridge to do homage to the friend he had helped so much.
But quite apart from his role in the history of Darwinism, Sir Joseph Hooker stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries as systematic botanist, plant geographer and explorer.
‘Few ever have known, or ever will know, plants as he knew them,’ wrote Professor Bower. His early years were spent at Glasgow, during his father’s professorship. The house, in which were accumulating the herbarium and library later to form the basis of the Kew collections, was near to the botanic garden, and he must have lived and breathed botany from morning to night. The intense love of plants acquired at Glasgow dominated his life.
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Philip Henry Gosse, in his (anonymous) 1856 guide, Wanderings through the Conservatories at Kew, describes the cycads:
Clustered at the south-east extremity of the house, a considerable area of which they occupy, we see a group of plants having a common character, notwithstanding the various botanical appellations that we read on their labels. They bear, in their arching pinnate leaves, radiating from the summit of a columnar stem, a certain resemblance to palms, and also to the tree-ferns, but have neither the stately grace of the one, nor the delicate elegance of the other, while their excessive rigidity, and the tendency of their leaves to form spinous points, give them a repulsive aspect.
A year later, in his bizarre book Omphalos – published just two years before the Origin of Species – Gosse, who was both a brilliant naturalist and a religious fundamentalist, attempted to reconcile the existence of fossils (which seemed to testify to former ages) with his belief in a single, instantaneous act of Creation. In his theory of ‘Prochron-ism’ he suggested that the entire crust of the earth, complete with its cargo of fossil plants and animals, was created in an instant by God and had only the appearance of a past, but no real past going with it: thus there had never been any living forms corresponding to the fossils. In the same way that Adam had been created in an instant as a young man (never a child, never born, with no umbilical cord – though nonetheless with an umbilicus, an omphalos), he argued, so a cycad, full of leaf-scars, seemingly centuries old, might also be quite newly created.
Taking an imaginary tour of the earth, a single hour after the Creation, he invites the reader to look at a panorama of animals and plants:
I wish you to look at this Encephalartos. A horrid plant it is, a sort of caricature of the elegant Palms, somewhat as if a founder had essayed a cocoa-nut tree in cast iron. Out of the thick, rough, stiff stem spring a dozen of arching fronds, beset with sharp, sword-shaped leaflets, but having the rigidity of horn, of a greyish hue, all harsh and repulsive to excess. In the midst of this rigid coronal sits the fruit, like an immense pine-cone…It would be no unreasonable conjecture to suppose that this great Cycadaceous plant is seven or eight centuries old.…Nay, for this also has been created even now!
This extraordinary notion – one cannot call it a hypothesis, for it cannot in principle be either proved or disproved – had the distinction of earning the derision of paleontologists and theologians alike.
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In his guide to Kew, Gosse includes a whimsical note on the Ci- botium there:
[It is] a singular vegetable production, of which, under the name of Scythian Lamb, many fabulous stories are told. It was said, among other things, to be part animal, part vegetable, and to have the power of devouring all the other plants in its vicinity. It is in reality nothing but the prostrate hairy stem of a fern, called Cibotium barometz, which, from its procumbent position and shaggy appearance, looks something like a crouching animal.
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One cannot look at the cycads in Kew or in the Hortus without a sense of their frailty too, the extinction which constantly threatens species which are special and rare. This came home to me especially in the Kirstenbosch Gardens in Capetown, where more than fifty species of the African cycad Encephalartos grow. Some of these are common, some are rare. One is unique, because it comes from a single (male) plant, E. woodii, discovered by Dr. Medley Wood in 1895. Though cuttings of the original have been cultivated (propagated asexually and thus clones of the original), no other trees of this species, male or female, have ever been found – and unless an unknown female exists somewhere, E. woodii will never pollinate or mate; it will be the last of its kind on earth.
Seeing the magnificent solitary specimen at Kirstenbosch, unla-belled and surrounded by an iron fence to discourage poachers, reminded me of the story of Ishi, the last of his tribe. I was seeing here a cycad Ishi, and it made me think of how, hundreds of millions of years ago, the numbers of tree lycopods, tree horsetails, seed ferns, once so great, must have diminished to a critical extent until there were only a hundred, only a dozen, only a single one left – and finally, one day, none at all; only the sad, compressed memory held in the coal.
(Another unique cycad, a female Ishi, Cycas multipinnata, has recently been found in a temple garden in China; no other specimens are known to exist. It is portrayed, with others, in a set of postage stamps issued in May 1996, commemorating cycad species native to China.)
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In the northern part of Guam, there is a tropical dry forest, dominated by cycads; in Rota the cycad forest is wetter, ‘mesic,’ though not true rain forest such as one sees on Pohnpei. The last few years have seen the destruction of Rota’s unique forests on a fearful scale, most especially with the building of Japanese golf courses. We encountered one such development as we were walking through the jungle – huge bulldozers tearing up the earth, mowing down an area of several hundred acres. There are now three golf courses on the island, and more are planned. Such clear-cutting of virgin forest causes an avalanche of acidic soil into the reef below, killing the coral which sustains the whole reef environment. And it may break up the jungle into areas too small to sustain themselves, so that within a few decades there will be a collapse of the entire ecosystem, flora and fauna alike.