The Missouri Botanical Garden is on a mission to save the planet's species from extinction

On his last trip to Ireland, it rained too hard for Peter Wyse Jackson to check out the island grasses he’s convinced kept medieval monks free of scurvy. But he still managed, always manages, to extract memories of the wild plants people once used as medicine or foraged to ease the pangs of the potato famine. Nobody wants to remember such resourcefulness; it reeks of poverty. But to their countryman, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and author of the first comprehensive book ever written about Irish ethnobotany, those herbs, mosses, and seaweeds are a rich heritage that’s fast being lost.

“At least one-fourth of all the world’s plant species are in danger of extinction,” he says, the words worn smooth with repetition. What they warn is that 1 million different sorts of plants and animals could vanish, any day now. The pace of loss is accelerating at an unprecedented speed, with extinction rates tens to hundreds of times faster than they’ve been for the past 10 million years.

What’s worse, we don’t even know what we’re losing. Scientists have cataloged only 1.3 million plant and animal species, notes a new 1,500-page United Nations report, and there are probably at least 8 million. Often a new species is discovered just as it’s vanishing, and the hope is that it can be yanked back from the precipice, protected, and propagated.

Why bother? If species are so abundant we can’t even count them, surely we can lose a bunch without noticing?

We can, and we are—but we will notice the consequences. Biodiversity is what’s held our planet together. Mangrove forests (more than 35 percent already gone) and coral reefs (half gone) did a beautiful job of protecting coastlines from flooding and erosion. Wetlands (85 percent gone) and native forests (75 million acres gone in just the past decade) efficiently cooled the ground. When any plant or animal loses its habitat and dies out, all the other species whose existence is interwoven with that one’s must either adapt or die, too. And if they adapt, the shift throws another mesh of species into danger. Torn from its anchors, the web unravels.

Humans are inventive: If an heirloom veggie vanishes, we swiftly concoct a substitute. But “most of nature’s contributions are not fully replaceable,” notes the new report. Land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23 percent of the Earth’s surface. We’re losing pollinators—probably because synthetic pesticides don’t distinguish between the insects that destroy our crops and the insects that make them possible. If we wipe out pollinators altogether, the group says, that would decrease production of pollen-dependent crops such as coffee, cocoa, and almonds by more than 90 percent. Already, our food supply is less varied, less nutritious, less resilient than it used to be.

It’s also less likely to heal us. More than 4 billion people rely mainly on natural medicines, and about 70 percent of cancer drugs either come directly from plants or are synthesized to mimic them. Properties we don’t yet fathom are locked inside specific plants, and as they die, they take their secrets with them.

So a tiny army of botanists is racing to protect as many plants as possible. Researchers at the Missouri Botanical Garden—which runs one of the three largest plant science programs in the world—discover, document, and attempt to protect about 250 new species every year. It’s a lot more complicated than gathering specimens and writing neat catalog descriptions.

“If we simply described them, we would be documenting their extinction,” notes Wyse Jackson. You can’t conserve plants “in isolation from the communities that surround and rely on them,” so you have to make sure those communities are sustainable. The Garden sometimes goes as far as helping “build schools and health centers and train people for new livelihoods—horticulture, tourism, basketry, fish farming,” all to create a resilient community around the plants they are working to protect.

Why are a bunch of mild, erudite botanists suddenly tangled up in the tensions of geopolitical borders, intercultural communication, and grassroots (apt phrase) community development?

Because our future hinges on the plants that sustain us—and their future hinges on us.

The Indiana Jones of Botany

Tom Croat is the Garden’s P.A. Schulze Curator of Botany, though he says he’s never met Mr. Schulze and isn’t even sure he’s alive: “He wasn’t one of the St. Louis muckety-mucks, but he accumulated a lot of wealth manufacturing dairy equipment, and one day he walked in and said he had some money to give away.” In his 52 years at the Garden, Croat has worked hard to do that impulse justice, collecting at more than 5,000 sites on six of the seven continents. He’s focused hardest on Andean South America and Central America, because “that’s where the Araceae reign supreme”; he is world-renowned as a specialist in that family. (Philodendron is its second-largest genus but in an exotic assortment, not just the variegated vine your grandmother grew.) Croat brought home enough suitcases of cuttings to give the Garden the largest living collection of Araceae in the world. He worries that molecular study is now so sexy, there won’t be enough experts doing this kind of fieldwork—and along the way battling malaria, getting kidnapped, keeping trigona bees out of their nostrils, and gingerly brushing away inch-long “bullet” ants whose sting feels like a gunshot.

The plants were worth it. Croat is especially fond of one of his many namesakes, Philodendron fortunense Croat, whose leaves are delicately veined, with a pale bluish-green underside and maroon on the central rib. Then there’s Philodendron patriciae, named for his wife after years of studiously avoiding such sentimental nonsense. “I always thought it was a little bit schmaltzy,” he says, “but in reality, my wife was more responsible for what I collected than anybody, simply because she allowed me to go.”

He spent four months sailing through the Amazon region, collecting plants that might yield cancer treatments. In Costa Rica, a wheel flew off his truck, which rolled seven times down a mountain and landed in the river. Squinting desperately, Croat saw his 3-year-old son at the top of the hill. He’d flown out of the truck on its first roll, and he was sobbing—but he still had enough presence of mind to spot his Mr. Magoo coloring book floating down the river.

Then there was the time Croat collected near Guatemala’s Volcán del Fuego: He slid 20 feet down into a trench, figuring he’d be able to climb out at another point—then realized the walls were mounds of ash, and not even his machete could find purchase. Finally he threw his collecting bag up onto the bank, then jumped as high as he could, threw himself forward, and grabbed hold of a clump of grass to pull himself up.

He notices my expression, a mix of awe and horror. “See, I was from a farm,” he explains. Deep down, he felt like botany “was a really wussy job. My dad died when I was 12, and we took over, running big tractors.” His eyes twinkle. “They call me reckless and accident prone, but I contend that I simply take chances.”

Now 81, he says that when he retires, he wants to collect more: “Pull over, have a whiskey, dry the plants. It won’t be like collecting in Central or South America, though. There, you can visit an area the size of a small room and find a percentage that are new.” He predicts that 8,000 more Araceae are waiting to be discovered: “We’re giving up too soon—and the plants are still there, undescribed and about to go extinct, because they are burning.”

Croat also can’t understand why nobody’s adapted his method of drying plants in the field. He devised it in Madagascar, bored with watching his plants dry when he could be out collecting. “An anthropologist left me his Land Rover. I had my friends build me a drying box for the back, put two three-burner stoves inside, took out the front seat, and put two propane tanks there instead, so I had an operational dryer that ran 24 hours.” As the bundles of dried plants piled up, he slept on top of them. Just one small problem: Sparks often ignited dried plant material, and he had to douse the flames with sand because drinking water was in short supply. When one of these conflagrations melted the Land Rover’s roof, he tweaked his design, putting an old refrigerator on one side, drilling holes in an iron pipe, adding a garage door track… “That truck enabled me to collect plants every day for weeks or even months,” he says, supremely satisfied.

When assistant scientist and education coordinator Mónica Carlsen set off with Croat on a Calla-collecting expedition in Ecuador, colleagues warned her about the hazards of traveling with “the Indiana Jones of botany.” Each day, she waited nervously for a catastrophe. Nothing happened. The worst was Croat’s disgust every time they reached a site where he’d once collected and found it paved or planted with short-lived crops. (He estimates that more than 70 percent of the places he’s visited are already gone.) But the little group continued on its way...until, at the very end of the trip, Croat locked his keys in the car.

“The first instrument he grabs to do anything is a machete,” Carlsen says. “He sliced all his fingers, and we had to go to the E.R.” She gives an exaggerated what’re-you-gonna-do shrug. “If you go with Tom and nothing happens, you didn’t go with Tom.”

A 20-Year Quest

It’s 1999. Tariq Stévart and his team are hacking new trails through the pristine forest of Príncipe, a tiny remote volcanic island off the west coast of Africa that’s one of the last botanically unknown places on Earth. It has its very own species of shrew, its own puddle frog, its own thrush and warbler and owl… Príncipe’s forest is thick with palms and lacy trees; from the air, the dense dark- and yellow-green mounds of foliage look like broccoli.

As he blazes his trail, Stévart collects specimens of a tree that looks like a palm. It will turn out to be one of the rarest species of central Africa, seen by maybe 1,000 people, max—and because he can’t find it in fruit or flower, it will stay nameless for 15 years.

Then, in 2014—cue the trumpets—the tree flowers. Alas, the flowers are male; there will be no fruit. But genetic studies confirm that the tree is new to science, so Stévart, associate curator at the Garden, starts a collecting program.

It isn’t easy. Three times, his team makes the trek to the highest point of the island, the tree’s favorite dwelling place. Once, they come close, but a thunderstorm erupts, so severe that they have to turn around. Once, they reach a precipice and can’t find a way to leap to the cliff on the other side. Finally, in 2018, Stévart returns with his original guide. Fired up, they vow they’ll be the first to make it to the peak. Picking their way across the ridges on a steep, narrow trail, they reach their destination. Stévart, who’s been looking down at his feet most of the way to avoid a misstep, finally looks up—and there’s the tree, right in front of him. They race—as though it’s a chimera that could vanish any second—to collect its fruit. Then Stévart pulls out his cell phone and takes photographs. Seconds later, botanists across the world answer with jubilant cheers: “Yes! You did it!”

It’s taken 20 years, but they’ve made it to the top, and they’ve found the tree, and it’s in fruit. Stévart tucks away his phone, exhales with satisfaction, and sits down on the hard ground to soak in the triumph. Then he groans. Trapped between the nearby rocks is a mud-encrusted Champagne bottle. Somebody beat them up here.

Ah, well. He has his fruit, and an odd fruit it is: smaller than a football, protected by tiers of huge spiny leaves. Its flowers are white, growing in long sprays as loaded with fragrance as a Parisian parfumerie. The sweet almond scent carries a dozen yards away.

The tree will be christened Pandanus principensis.

Eyelash Vipers and Sacred Seeds

They start with a pile of 6,000 fruits. Working intently for 19 hours, three horticulturists carefully pry open each seed pod, breathless as safecrackers. Using small knives or fingernails, they try desperately not to damage the four seeds inside each pod. From more than 2,400 possibilities, they find just 133 seeds that look like they might be viable.

Now, in the soft, diffused light of the greenhouse, 30 bright-green baby Karomia gigas are growing. It’s the first time they’ve been successfully propagated.

K. gigas was first discovered in 1977, in a tiny fragment of sacred forest on the coast of Kenya. The same tree was found in 1980, but when botanists returned five years later, it had been cut down, and they never found another. The tree was presumed extinct.

Decades later, a different botanist found a single fruit from this species at the edge of a forest about 380 miles away, in Tanzania. Then, in 2011, Tanzanian botanists from the University of Dar es Salaam found six or seven K. gigas trees in the Mitundumbea Forest Reserve, about 17 miles from where the fruit had turned up. Roy Gereau, Tanzania program director at the Garden, verified the rediscovery.

So far, 19 K. gigas trees have been found, all in two forests in southern Tanzania. Most are mature; no one’s found any seedlings or saplings. “Insects come in and do some predation on the flowers,” Gereau explains, “and the insects’ poop is a really good medium for fungus, so most of the seeds are dead before they fall off the tree.” It’s also possible that their pollinators are gone, he adds, plus there’s the degradation of the surrounding forest and the coup de grâce of a warming climate.

It’s a shame, because K. gigas is, in other ways, pretty damn resilient. Its seeds are surrounded by a large papery veined oval ruffle, and its mottled reddish-brown trunk is so sturdy, it can reach 80 feet high. In the broadest sense, this tree is—prepare to have your brain bent—part of the mint family, though it’s closer to teak than to peppermint. “We discourage anyone in Tanzania from saying ‘teak,’” Gereau adds hastily, “because it probably has good timber, and we don’t want anyone to think about that.”

Further classification won’t be possible until the Garden’s seedlings grow big enough to flower, and even the genus name Karomia is a strong guess rather than a certainty. Molecular study has drastically changed ideas about plant families, Gereau notes. Instead of just comparing pistils, petals, and fruit shapes, we’re analyzing DNA, revealing common ancestors and evolutionary history.

He shows me Gigasiphon macrosiphon, with huge flowers as creamy white as a magnolia’s, seed pods a dull aubergine, bark a whitish or pinkish gray. “The seedlings are like crack to the little forest antelopes and feral pigs,” he adds. When the species was last surveyed, in November 2018, only 38 individuals could be found. Now, more than 1,400 have been planted in Kenya, and more are planned for Tanzania.

Gereau worked on a summary of the 909 threatened plant, insect, and animal species in the eastern mountains and coastal forests of Tanzania and Kenya. He shows me pictures: a frog the size of his thumbnail, a bird with white cue ball circles around her eyes, odd chameleons and eyelash vipers, the only handheld photo ever taken of a timid Abbott’s duiker, a forest antelope. “How anybody is ever bored is beyond me,” he remarks.

How, though, does he deal with the frustration of species loss?

“Determination.” He sets his jaw tight just saying the word. “If I were a pessimist, I’d be trading stocks and drinking myself blind.”

Finding a Family

Associate curator Libing Zhang is uncharacteristically grumpy. He’s been bitten by four leeches, and by the time they suck his blood and explode, his foot and ankle are swollen and itching like mad. He cancels the next day’s outing and sends his students to one of Vietnam’s national parks without him.

They bring back a forest fern whose significance strikes him immediately: Its sori (reproductive structures) are unlike those in any other genus. This fern, in other words, is a family unto itself.

“It was unambiguous,” he says now. “So I didn’t witness the discovery, but the next day”—he brightens—“we went back to the same spot. It was a happy day.”

On another trip, he explored the caves of Guizhou, China, and discovered Poly-stichum speluncicola, an entire species that lives in a single cave. “More rare than the panda bear!” he exclaims. “Only maybe 17 individuals. Before I walked in, no one even knew it existed.” In the Cave of the Flying Tiger, he found yet another... He’s explored hundreds of caves, and all told, he’s discovered 269 species, five new genera, and two new families.

But “there’s just so much more that needs to be done,” he says. “We spend a month in the field and discover 20 new species. As a taxonomist, I feel a lot of responsibility.” Not only is the atmosphere heating, but companies are also beginning to raid the small caves of Southeast Asia for limestone, and tourists, medicinal plant hunters, and funeral processions are endangering caves in China. “It’s a race against time.”

Stroke of Genus

The day she first recognized a member of her plant family (Melastomataceae, or “princess flowers”) that had gone unidentified for 40 years, Carmen Ulloa Ulloa felt a prophetic tingle. She’d discovered not just a new species but a new genus. DNA slotted it into the right branch of its phylogenetic tree, and all it needed was a name. “You know quipu, the accounting system used by the Inca?” she asks, so eagerly that I hate to disappoint her. “They used knotted strings of llama or cotton thread. One morning I woke up and said, ‘These flowers remind me of the quipus!’ So we named it Quipuanthus.”

It came in as the 6.5 millionth specimen in the Garden’s herbarium. “We haven’t officially reached 7 million mounted specimens,” she says, “but we have well in excess when we include specimens not yet fully processed. I will not be surprised if we actually are the largest herbarium in the world.”

When she collects, Ulloa likes to go high above the treeline, where the silence is complete—save for the grumbling of a nearby volcano. “You can see the fumes,” she says, “and a couple hours later, clouds of ash are falling on you.” Earthquakes can be dramatic, too. But the only time she’s been “really, really scared” was in a small mountain village: “The chief came out, and he didn’t have one eye, and people came out with machetes and surrounded the car. There are always problems with religious groups trying to convert, so we said, ‘No, no, that’s not who we are!’”

Usually they try to pair up with scientists at a local university. Still, this isn’t safe work. According to Global Witness, an international NGO, more than 1,000 environmental activists and journalists were killed between 2002 and 2013, and the violence has redoubled since. A botanist could easily get caught in the fray.

The Green Thumb

There are 10 Cylindrocline commersonii left in the world (if you don’t count the dude on eBay selling what are purportedly their seeds), and all 10 are perched on the tip of a mountain, Le Pouce (French for “the thumb”) in Mauritius. Andrew Wyatt, the Garden’s senior vice president of horticulture and living collections, scrambles up the rock face in a repeat of one of Charles Darwin’s famous climbs. Sweating, Wyatt reaches the peak and spots the pinkish lavender of the tiny shrub, just out of reach. Placing his foot on the rock that juts out the farthest, he grabs tight hold of a clump of grass, then leans out even farther.

“Don’t!” yells Becky Sucher, senior manager of living collections. “Be careful!”

He leans farther, his other hand reaching. Five words repeat in his head, slicing right through his usual British formality: “I’m. Gonna. Get. That. Seed.”

And so he does. There are now more C. commersonii growing at the Garden than there are in the wild. Their fuzzy leaves grab moisture from the air; their flowers sport short pink petals like an aster’s. The next step is a drone to photograph the top of the mountain, so the team can check locations for the 10 remaining plants. And then, Wyatt tells Sucher, “we’re gonna bring some climbing gear.”

Another plant, the pretty blue Nesocodon mauritianus, grows along a cliffside waterfall, 500 feet down. There are fewer than 300 individuals left in the world, none within reach. It’s called a bloody bell flower, because it may be the first plant ever found to produce red nectar. It’s believed to be pollinated by a native gecko who lives on the cliffs.

“It’s a beautiful climb,” says Sucher, “and then you start going vertical, and it’s almost always covered in clouds, so you can’t see over the cliff at all—it’s a little unnerving.” She smooths her hair, remembering how hard the wind blew—

“That’s what makes it fun,” inserts Wyatt. “You often find the highest plant diversity in the most challenging conditions.” The plants have to work so hard to stay alive, they keep evolving.

A Contemporary Eden

Wyatt and Sucher don’t confine themselves to hot climes: Central Asia is where many of the world’s fruit and nuts—apples, pears, plums, walnuts, pistachios, almonds—originate, and their wild ancestor species are in danger. “There are countable numbers of some species of wild apple and pear trees left in the forests of Kyrgyzstan,” says Wyatt. On a trip that felt a little like a foray to the Garden of Eden, his team helped set up a seed bank and put advanced propagation methods in place.

Why, when the grocery store seems to have plenty? “What you see on grocery shelves is a very small amount of diversity, mostly clones,” Sucher explains. “Wild ancestors taste different—some sour, some sweet, some bitter, some juicy, even in the same species. That’s what genuine diversity is. And if we’re ever going to breed for disease resistance or storage time or different flavors, we need it.”

Many of the trees in the area they’re targeting don’t reproduce anymore. Two of the most endangered species are Malus niedzwetzkyana, an apple that’s rosy red to its core (just 200 individuals left in Kyrgyzstan), and Pyrus korshinskyi, a pear tree (only 80 individuals left). Wyatt’s also hoping to return with “some gorgeous irises and the old Ottoman tulips,” because the Garden aims to be a microcosm of the world’s flora.

Indeed, it’s spearheading World Flora Online, a new database that pulls together everything botanists know about what grows on the planet. Scheduled for completion in 2020, with data fed by partner institutions to an IT team here in St. Louis, World Flora Online will describe 400,000 species and where they’re found. Google’s clearing cloud space in anticipation.

Taking a Mountain’s Temperature

Every time he flies in to Thimphu, the largest city in the Kingdom of Bhutan, Robbie Hart is sure the plane’s landing in a forest. There’s no asphalt in sight until, at the very last minute, the plane makes a sharp turn. Relieved, Hart heads straight for Jomolhari, a sacred mountain at the border of Tibet. After a long, bumpy drive, there’s sometimes a horseback ride, then his team faces days of hiking; through colder and colder air, until they break through the treeline and camp about 12,000 feet above sea level. Even for Bhutan, the site is remote.

Assistant curator in high elevation plant ecology and ethnobotany, Hart is  comparing current temperatures and plant communities to the data gathered eight years earlier. They drove 5-foot lengths of rebar into the earth to cordon off plots of earth 1 meter square, then pounded the poles until they were invisible. “Even then, people took them,” he says ruefully. “They’re thinking, ‘I’d love this to reinforce my yak pen!’”

Hart and his teammates use GPS coordinates to find the right mountain summit, play a matching game with photos and fieldbooks until they find the right configuration of rock and tree, then whip out a metal detector and locate the rebar. After they collect the recorded data and document surrounding plant life, they head, exhausted, back to base camp. They’ve come across “crazy plants” this time, up in the alpine scree: “You’d think you were underwater. Corydalis with huge flowers and fat rosettes of fleshy leaves, or with leaves that look like stones. A purple Soroseris that was just a dome of flowers, a tiny ring of leaves barely visible at the ground.”

Soroseris are in the same family as dandelion and usually bright yellow, so he was excited about the purple. Alas, it turned out to be a previously undescribed color morph, not a new species: “We found the world specialist in Soroseris, and he said, ‘That’s so funny. I got an email a week ago from a Chinese researcher who was in Tibet and had seen the same color morph, maybe 30 kilometers from where you were’—quite close but across a huge mountain range and a very well-guarded border!” Nature ignores geopolitical boundaries. It does heed deep mountain valleys, though: Bhutan’s ecosystems are very different from those in Nepal, where Hart’s climb “started off in cardamom plantations with water buffalo and leeches in the swamps.”

The new specimens will stay in Bhutan; the kingdom wants its own scientists meaningfully involved in all research. Often, if no one’s active in a certain area, the government will wait. Hart, an easygoing sort, tries to see this prohibition as an incentive for collaboration. Luckily, there are now three active Bhutanese scientists who did their graduate work in St. Louis.

Skimming his new data, Hart sees temperatures increasing rapidly, as expected. Plant elevation ranges are “tracking” this change by climbing (the treeline moves up as the climate warms). But the elevation ranges aren’t shifting fast enough to match the pace of climate change. One possibility is that alpine rhododendrons are so long-lived, they won’t respond fast; also, they dominate the environment, carpeting the ground with leathery leaves that don’t break down easily. “So you can either say they’re resilient to the effects of climate change,” he notes, “or you can say they’re preventing the system as a whole from adapting to climate change.”

As changes do take hold, he’s interested in learning whether the real dilemma isn’t that it’s too hot for certain plants but rather that it’s warm enough for their competitors to move in and crowd them out. As warmth moves into alpine areas, treelines move upward. Hart mentions “a Swertia, in the gentian family, that only grows in the alpine area,” probably to avoid the competition below. That little Swertia is in for a rude awakening.

Stepping Through a Forest Wall

The forest of southeastern Madagascar is so wet, a giant could wring out its dense foliage like a dishrag. “It’s a wonderland for botany,” senior curator Pete Lowry tells his 13-year-old son, who’s come along for his first taste of fieldwork, “and this mountain range has never been seriously explored.” Sunlight halos the leaves, misty from the previous night’s rain. They hike to the edge of the forest, then enter, and it feels like walking through a wall.

Midmorning, it starts to rain again.  Lowry’s son holds plant specimens under an umbrella so his dad can photograph them. They make it only about 500 feet into the forest, because they keep finding cool plants nobody recognizes.

One is a member of the aster family, its flowers glowing in a bright-soft way that reminds Lowry of red coral lit by ocean-filtered sunlight. Once verified, the aster will bear his name: Lowryanthus (anthus means plant) rubens (red).

Just nine specimens later, Lowry finds another gorgeous plant, equally unfamiliar. This one will be named Bemangidia (for the forest) lowryi. He’s discovered both specimens on the same morning, in the same forest, just minutes apart. “I cannot imagine that there was any day anywhere in the world in the past two centuries when that happened,” he exults, “and it was pure luck.”

The next day, they go deeper into the forest, higher in altitude. Lowry squints up at a tree, its thick leaves poised on rigid stalks. It, too, is unlike anything he’s ever seen. “There are no specimens of this plant in the Garden’s herbarium,” he announces. “Or in the Paris herbarium. Or in the two Madagascar herbaria. Or in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.”

The tree will take a while to name, because it belongs to what used to be a single genus but has since been split into five different evolutionary branches of the ivy and ginseng family. “Your houseplants aren’t Schefflera after all,” Lowry tells me after the trip. “With DNA, we’ve been able to piece together the basic tree of evolution for all plants; there are very few mysteries left about the framework. Now we’re drilling down to understand, at a finer level, the species’ histories. Two plants can look alike and be very different. ”

About 87 percent of Madagascar’s plant species occur nowhere else in the world. Why? Because it’s an island, physically isolated, and jagged with mountains, its land slashed into deep valleys and high ridges. In the mid-’80s, when the Garden began working in Madagascar, the consensus was that Madagascar hosted 8,900 different species.

The current estimate is 14,000.

Director of the Garden’s Africa & Madagascar Program, Lowry received a grant to identify priority areas for plant conservation. His team identified 79, and 45 are now legally protected. The land is owned and managed by the Malagasy government, and various institutions—in 13 cases, the Garden itself—partner with local residents to protect its biodiversity.

The first site Lowry’s team chose to protect was the Mahabo Forest, a rainforest growing on a thin strip of white sand a few kilometers from the ocean. Its plants are found nowhere else; its ecosystem is as distinct as the small band of rare gray-headed lemurs that lives there.

Those lemurs are as rooted in place as the oldest family in Appalachia. But now that new protections have stabilized  the forest, that band of 40 stalwarts has grown into a flourishing colony of 140.

The save was relatively simple; in other areas, protection requires a process of engagement as delicate as the Paris Peace Accords. “We don’t tell the local community what to do,” Lowry emphasizes. “We say, ‘Here’s a piece of forest. Tell us what you think about it, what your older members remember. Would you be interested in developing a future that doesn’t have it disappear?’ They say, ‘But we need it for timber, for cash,’ and we say, ‘What if there were alternatives?’

“Some communities still say no,” he says. Others are dubious but willing. “Sometimes it’s just a question of having one or two people who get it, and then we can begin to develop a shared vision. We always have a full-time Missouri Botanical Garden person based in the community. That was not the traditional paradigm in the past. But the only way to accompany a community that’s evolving is to be there, to be part of the process and to see what’s going on.”

Having someone based in each community sounds like a fiscal luxury, but the budget is shoestring—deliberately so. “The higher you fly, the harder you fall,” Lowry points out wryly. “And the other thing we realized from the large, often unsuccessful projects is, they go for three years and end, and there’s no more funding, and you haven’t changed the way people manage their landscapes.” Real change happens over generations. “It starts with environmental education in schools and people agreeing to renounce their level of extraction from the forest. But you can’t have the quality of life go down; it has to go up, so you have to have good alternatives.”

If you just present those alternatives on a platter without listening to ideas from the community, he adds, it’s too easy for things to slide back to where they were. “Efficient conservation is a consequence of good community engagement. We are getting massive botanical conservation as a consequence.”