“The Plant Messiah”. Adventures in search of the World’s rarest Species. Carlos Magdalena, tropical botanical horticulturist at RBG Kew, dedicated to saving and conserving endangered plants.
One of the extraordinary stories told by Magdalena in her book is that of the brown coffee plant, Ramosmania rodriguesii, a native of Rodrigues Island in the Indian Ocean.
“I was hooked on the story of this plant because I found it very sad,” Magdalena noted.
For a long time, the plant was thought to be extinct until a child found a unique specimen in 1979.
For more than 20 years scientists have tried unsuccessfully to get the plant to bear fruit. They only managed to obtain new plants by clonal reproduction, taking cuttings or branches and rooting them.
“However, when you reproduce clonally you don’t have two plants, you have the same plant split in two, there is no sexual reproduction and genetic change.
“The plant was known as “the living dead” because “it was alive but its species was dead” as it could not reproduce naturally. Magdalena managed after several years of work to obtain fruits and seeds from the elusive Ramosmania rodriguesii.
“I researched how many days the flowers of the cloned plants lasted, the pollen, I watched every day how the plant developed,” he recalls. “I noticed that under certain conditions, with more sun and heat in the last two. or three days of what was the florida cycle, it looked like the female part of the plant was opening up a bit and was receptive. “
After obtaining then Magdalena studied three years the growth of the plant until obtaining male and female plants, and assuring the natural reproduction.
“A little bit of the lesson of this plant is to never throw in the towel,” Magdalena noted.
“They had said ‘there’s a plant left and there’s nothing left to do, we better forget about it.’ But as long as there’s life there’s hope.”
Here’s an interview with Carlos Magdalena on BBC news about his work and more information on books related to the plant world in the 3peusdegat green books section.