Tom Chivers is the Telegraph's assistant comment editor. He writes
mainly on science. Not a poet - that's the other Tom Chivers. Read
older posts by Tom here.
Kew's 'codebreaker' mourns his lily
By Tom Chivers Science Last updated: January 15th, 2014
18 Comments Comment on this article
Carlos Magdalena, holding the Nymphaea thermarum water lily,
surrounded by its giant relative, Victoria amazonica. (Photo: Getty)
Carlos Magdalena 'has done things no one else can do' but a thief has
put at risk his work to save a tiny, rare plant. Tom Chivers reports
In a little warm puddle in rural Rwanda, a tiny flower used to grow; a
water lily, barely half an inch across. It was discovered in 1985 by
Eberhard Fischer, a German botanist, and it lived only in this one hot
volcanic spring, in a place called Mashyuza.
It had survived there for perhaps millions of years, possibly since
the whole area was a giant lake. But, in 2008, the hot spring where
the wild flower lived was diverted to provide water for a local
laundry. Immediately, an entire species was obliterated.
Or almost obliterated. Fischer had brought a few specimens home with
him, to the botanical garden in Bonn where he worked. He was able to
keep them alive, reasonably happily. But no one was able to work out
how to make them flower, to make them reproduce. The tiny lily
appeared to be doomed.
Fischer and his colleagues tried everything they knew, and asked for
help from around the world. But nothing worked — until 2010, when a
horticulturalist at Kew Gardens, in west London, finally solved a
puzzle that had beaten a generation of fellow botanists, and grew the
"thermal water lily", Nymphaea thermarum, once more. It's still
perilously rare, but a few specimens live. Now, someone has stolen
one.
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The man who resurrected the Nymphaea was Carlos Magdalena, a
Spanish-born plant-grower whose colleagues describe him as a
"codebreaker".
"He has been able to do things that no one else can do," says Richard
Barley, the director of horticulture at Kew. "We have some very
skilful and knowledgeable people here. It is their paid profession,
but it is also usually their passion, so they go the extra mile, they
work out the special way of doing something; they care for the plants
like family members. Carlos is a classic example."
Normally, water lilies are pretty straightforward to grow. They live
in relatively deep water; their seeds sink, eventually, to the bottom
of the lake or pond and grow from there to a few inches below the
surface, sending a leaf all the way to the top.
"But this was a very odd water lily," says Magdalena. "We tried the
normal stuff, but it just wouldn't work. It would germinate, but then
it would get weaker and weaker and die without flowering."
Magdalena and his colleagues tried changing everything: temperatures,
composts, water acidity, nutrients, light levels: "We knew it had to
be something." Eventually, he had a breakthrough: the one thing that
was different about this plant was that it grew in a spring, not a
pond; its water levels dropped and rose, depending on how much water
was coming out.
Unlike most water lilies, it was sometimes exposed to the air — and to
carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide doesn't dissolve as well in water as it
does in air, so growing it in water meant it was starved of the carbon
it needed to grow. "It's quite complex getting carbon dioxide in
water. But then I realised that, if Mohammed doesn't go to the
mountain, the mountain must go to Mohammed. So instead of putting the
carbon dioxide in the water, I exposed the plant to the air.
"So when the plant was two millimetres tall, I put it in one
millimetre of water, so that it keeps really moist, but it still has
contact with the air. And within two or three months, it flowered."
Nymphaea thermarum is small, but it is beautiful. And beautiful, rare
things are covetable. "With any rare objects around the world, be that
plants, animals or art objects or what have you, there are dishonest
people who would seek to have access to and to have the item," Barley
says.
Magdalena is more specific: "There are amateur growers who are totally
obsessed with cultivating these rare plants. They will go to
incredible lengths to get them – pay huge amounts of money, or put
themselves at risk by going to dangerous locations in dodgy countries,
or just steal them. And, of course, there are people who might hire
someone to do it."
On one level, the fact that the thief will probably be knowledgeable
about the plant might be considered a good thing. "The stolen plant
could survive," Magdalena says. "These people will have read the
articles about how to cultivate it: I've written up how to propagate
it, because if I get hit by a train and I'm the only person who knows
how, that's not good. So the thief could provide the right
conditions."
But, in fact, from the species' point of view, that might not be
entirely helpful. "The problem is not really the value of this
specimen as a living individual," Magdalena says. "We have lots –
about 100. Now that we know how to grow it, it's not difficult. It's
more about the value of the plant as a biological resource."
Kew Gardens and other major botanical centres are signed up to an
agreement called the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Nymphaea thermarum, the smallest waterlily in the world. (Photo: PA)
"It's a very cute little plant, and there are many growers who'd love
to have one at home. That means that there will always be a market for
it. If we were going to commercialise this, or make a scientific
discovery, we'd be required to share the proceeds with the country of
origin, and perhaps help with restoring the wild location of the
plant."
A plant thief, though, is unlikely to have signed any international
agreements; they'd be happy to sell it on illegally and deprive
conservationists in the country of origin of money that could go
towards bringing back the plant in the wild.
The Metropolitan Police has appealed for witnesses but it has no
specialist division; the investigation is in the hands of the local
Richmond CID.
In some ways, it is easier to conserve plants than animals, because
you can store their genetic material indefinitely as seeds. "But the
disadvantage plants have, in the conservation battle, is that animals
often have fur and appealing eyes," Barley says. "People sometimes
find plants a little harder to love." That's less the case with
spectacular flowering plants, he says — he sounds almost dismissive of
the attention that "showy" orchids get — but smaller, or less
beautiful, plants struggle to get noticed.
And Magdalena is keen not to focus too hard on Nymphaea thermarum.
"I'm pleased to have solved the problem — if I'd failed, I would have
felt awful — and in a way it's an important plant for me.
"But the problem of conservation is so big, so really it's just one
problem out of 100 million. There's no time for complacency; on
Mauritius alone, in the Indian Ocean, there are 275 species of plants
which are critically endangered. There are about 75 of which there are
fewer than 10 specimens. And there are several of which there is only
one specimen."
Magdalena was instrumental in saving the café marron, Ramosmania
rodriguesii, of which only one known example survived in the wild, on
the Mauritian island of Rodrigues – he successfully managed to induce
it to flower and breed.
Funnily enough, in Rwanda, Nymphaea thermarum has made an attempt to
revive itself. The laundry that killed it closed down after a couple
of years and a local sweet potato farmer diverted some of the water
that had flowed into it to grow his crops.
Even though the lilies were all dead – and there were none in any of
the dozens of other hot springs in the Rift Valley (Fischer had
checked) — some seeds had survived in the mud a few hundred yards
below the original pool and the warm water had allowed them to
germinate.
It's a precarious life, relying on the vagaries of the Rwandan sweet
potato market. But the lily is back in the valley.
More by Tom Chivers
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***Transmission Time Interval (TTI) on Wednesday January 15th, 2014:
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