Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Finding a successor for Peter Raven after his 40-year tenure would’ve been like hunting a rare orchid in the Himalayas—if Peter Wyse Jackson hadn’t existed. He’s more of a cabbages-and-potatoes guy, himself, but he’s Raven’s match in brilliance and passion, and he has the world’s attention already. He led the way in developing the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation that the U.N. adopted, and he now chairs the Global Partnership for Plant Conservation. Last September, after five years as director of the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland, Wyse Jackson became president of the Missouri Botanical Garden. He was just a bit nervous about leading one of the world’s top three botanical gardens. But he’s loving his job.
Where in Ireland did you grow up?
I was born in Kilkenny, but my father became Anglican dean in Cashel, County Tipperary. We lived in an enormous, ramshackle country rectory in Cashel, where I would prop my teddy bear on the bracket fungus growing probably from timber in the wall. The house has been restored as a wonderful hotel—I could go back and stay there, if I could afford it!
How’d you get interested in botany?
I started out as a bird-watcher, at 9 or 10. The birds, of course, flew away, and then I was left looking at what they’d been sitting on. I come from a family of people who have always been very interested in things—but it was usually literature, history, theology. There were five of us kids, and dinner conversation ranged from the history of some extraordinary archbishop to the latest music of The Beatles to my latest discoveries, after I’d pranced around the countryside with my butterfly net. I think the thing that most encouraged me was that the family didn’t think I was eccentric.
Who was your first mentor?
A wonderful biology teacher. We went for a walk once, and I said, “How can you remember all these scientific names?” He said, “It’s just practice. If you get to know them intimately, you will be able to identify them.” He gave me a book called An Irish Flora and suggested doing one a day during summer vacation. By the end of summer, I knew 90 species intimately. And that really was the start of it.
The entire flora of Ireland? That must’ve been a fat book!
Not at all. Ireland’s had only 13,000 years to get its plants; 13,000 years ago, it was covered with ice. When the ice retreated, everything marched back in, and some things didn’t get there before the sea level rose. Ireland’s native flora is just under 200 species. Here, it’s in the tens of thousands.
At Trinity College Dublin, you earned a Ph.D. in the taxonomy of the Irish…Cruciferae?
The cabbage family. They’re called crucifer because the flower is in the shape of a cross. The particular one I worked on was scurvy grass; its leaves are full of vitamin C, and sailors would eat them.
Sorry, but “taxonomy” sounds a little dry. How does one study it?
You look at the similarities and differences between individuals—one might have hairy stems and one might not—and then you decide whether they fall into natural groups, or species. My scurvy grasses were extraordinary things, because they had little minor variations, and they all produced hybrids and blurred the differences between them.
What was most fun in those years?
I had a little car, a turquoise Renault 4, and I’d head off for weeks at a time around the coasts of Ireland collecting my plants. I didn’t realize how lucky I was!
Have you gotten to do anything like that as a grown-up?
I have, actually. In the ’80s, I led a wonderful expedition to Mauritius. I camped on a little offshore desert island doing botanical surveys. The romance of something like Robinson Crusoe is far from the reality: At night, I would shake the rats out of my sleeping bag. But that’s where I really became interested in plant conservation. [He brings over a framed ink drawing of Nesocodon mauritianus.] This grows only on a waterfall in the center of Mauritius. I managed to hang over the cliff and get a couple of seed capsules. I brought them back to Ireland and germinated the seed, and it’s now been introduced to many botanical gardens around the world. We’ve just got it here—I got a seedpod from the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland.
Will you need to put in a waterfall?
No. I think I know where it will grow.
You’re not saying?
No. Partly because I don’t want to tempt fate. And also, I’m sure the horticultural team will tell me why it needs to grow somewhere else. That’s their job.
How do you know when you’ve found something that exists nowhere else?
That’s one of the great contributions the Missouri Botanical Garden has made. With the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, it posted the world’s first-ever checklist [theplantlist.org] on December 29, 2010, two days before the end of the International Year of Biodiversity. It contains information on more than one million species. This one had been described already, so I knew it was there. But if I were to discover a plant like this one for the first time, I would come to the herbarium here. We have almost 7 million specimens, dried, preserved, and labeled on sheets.
How did your childhood landscape shape you?
My memory of the landscape is agricultural land and hedgerows and picnics amongst the cowslips. And summers in a cottage in Kerry, on the beach. Kerry is much wilder: It’s mountains and bogs, and you can see distances. I was immersed during those summers, and I grew to love the environment, and it really drove me crazy when I saw things being done to destroy it.
What’s lost, for kids who don’t grow up immersed in nature?
The perspective of our place within the world. Food comes from the supermarket, and what happens in other parts of the world is very alien to their experience. If you experience nature only through a computer screen, you don’t get the smells, the discomforts, the stings, the pleasure of all of the senses being engaged. And you don’t see your part in the system.
What if someone says, “But I could avoid the nettles and beestings and just look out the window from an air-conditioned room”?
Well, you can. One can. But…we protect what we love. If we simply see nature as something we can pass through and enjoy at a distance, we will not appreciate why it’s important. Last week, I was at a conference in the Azores. Someone asked when we were going to make money out of biodiversity. I said, “Just think, if we didn’t have biodiversity, what the cost would be. How can you value the cost of clean water? How can you value our climate being regulated by the forests around us? How can you value the peace of a week in the countryside?”
Do you make any personal sacrifices for the environment’s sake?
I suppose I’m a bit driven in some ways; I do feel that I ought to live up to my own rhetoric. I had a few prints I wanted to frame for this office, and a framer suggested some really nice mahogany, and I said, “Oh, mahogany’s an endangered species.” He said, “That’s OK, I’ve got jelutong,” a tropical hardwood from the forests of Indonesia, and I said, “Oh, big problem. That’s not sustainable either.” It took me six months to get my pictures framed. [He gestures toward the wall: gorgeous botanical prints surrounded by a clean edge of metal.]
Is curating a major botanical garden at all like the joyful, frustrating, absorbing task of cultivating a garden at home?
Only in the building blocks: plants, landscape, vistas, colors. Having a garden that one can actually dig in and plant is, I’m afraid, a different task than what I’m doing here. However, I remain interested and involved in both. I planted an apple tree in the garden of the director’s residence, and I could see the maintenance staff laughing: “Oh, he’s still able to dig!”
You’re also finishing a book on Irish ethnobotany.
One of my research areas is the use of plants—I love to explore the ways they have influenced our lives. The history of the potato is extraordinary. It was a relatively recent arrival, and in a few generations, the population of Ireland doubled. When the potato famine hit, 1 million people died of starvation and famine-related diseases, and 1 million emigrated. Even the history of the United States would have been different without that famine.
Do you prefer gardens that are manicured or haphazard, tame or wild?
I love the tranquility of the woodland garden, and the fact that it is a re-creation of what we imagine nature to be like. I also enjoy the grandeur of a formal garden with parterres. But my greatest interest is in the components of the garden: the plants themselves. I like the ones that tell a story. [He points out the window.] That conifer tree there would just be a tree, if I didn’t know it was a living fossil, discovered in central China 50 or so years ago. Essentially, it was the equivalent of somebody discovering a dinosaur living in central China. Before that, it was known only from fossils; it almost became extinct. And now it has become an important garden tree. [He gets up again and grabs a driftwoody piece of Scots pine.] I collected this from under a bog in the west of Ireland. That tree lived 5,000 years ago, just before the climate changed, the bog grew up, and the forests were submerged. When timber was scarce, people would go out and in the morning dew, they could see patterns and shapes in the bog, and they would put their augers down and feel for these trunks and dig them up.
Aside from practical benefits, why are gardens so restorative?
Probably because we evolved in the environment, so it’s part of us. We didn’t evolve in a cave. We didn’t evolve indoors. Our lives were outdoors, part of nature.
Is gardening trendy because it counterbalances our stressful, high-tech lives?
There is that, but I also think there’s a new realization that nature is fragile, and if we don’t do something, we are going to lose it.
Are there any countries that have always recognized nature’s importance?
Most of us have been pretty hopeless up till now. There isn’t a country in the world that doesn’t have an endangered species. We have to take hope from the speed with which the environmental movement has grown. But equally, we must be pretty depressed at the rate of environmental destruction. So it’s a race against time.
Do you believe some places are more sacred than others?
Some places are richer in biodiversity, but that doesn’t answer your question. There are places I feel more comfortable, but again, that doesn’t answer your question. I think a sacred place is very personal for the individual. There are pieces of countryside, landscapes I would regard as sacred to me, but that’s because I feel comfortable in them; I understand their history. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily magic, any hidden ingredient. The aboriginal people in Australia regard desert as sacred because it’s part of their culture, whereas to settlers from Europe, it’s simply desert—until they get to understand it. In India, there’s a network of sacred groves, places where people have collected medicinal plants for millennia. And this botanical garden is sacred to many people in St. Louis, for precisely the same reasons.
