CHARLIE BANCROFT: It's Sunday the 14th of January, my Dad's

birthday, happy birthday. We set off this morning, early morning

from the campsite at Cradle Mountain.

We're surrounded by tree ferns which are mammoths and all

different types of ferns. It's really cool and damp and it's

just amazing kind of environment to walk around in so different

to the environments that we've been to already.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: This story is one that has been growing with

us for a long time, with the seeds being sown almost 100

years ago.

It takes place in a faraway land with blood-sucking beasts, rope

bridges, waterfalls and poisonous plant life. I'm Ranger

Rosie Holdsworth. Welcome to the wild tale of the plant hunters.

The voice you heard at the start is that of Charlie Bancroft, a

gardener from Nymans in West Sussex, who in 2018, alongside a

team of botanists from across the UK and Ireland, were

presented with a discovery. The diary and collecting notes of a

Mr Harold Comber.

CHARLIE BANCROFT: Harold Comber went on two trips, one to Chile

in I think 1925 and then he went to Tasmania and stayed there for

a year.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The Comber family have played an important

role in the history of Nymans and its ornate gardens and

grounds.

CHARLIE BANCROFT: So you had James Comber, the head gardener

here at Nymans and Harold Comber was his son.

And Harold Comber grew up on the estate as a young boy and then

got interested in horticulture and went on to do these two

plant hunting expeditions.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Towards the start of 2018, a call was made

by Mary Miles Comber, the daughter of Harold, to the then

head gardener of Nymans. In her possession were the blueprints,

a treasure map if you will, detailing all of the plants and

collections gathered from Harold's 1929 expedition to

Tasmania.

CHARLIE BANCROFT: Harold Comber is someone that's not relatively

well known in the horticultural world in terms of bringing

plants to UK and so the head gardener set out that he wanted

to kind of celebrate Harold Comber and one of the ways to do

that was to follow in one of the expeditions.

I think on receiving the information and these collecting

notes, yeah, I got really, really excited about it and that

was kind of, yeah, the impetus to want to go.

Tasmania was picked because there used to be a Tasmanian

walkway in the wild garden, which has been lost now.

So it was to restore the Tasmanian walkway, highlight

Harold Comber as a plant hunter and also my role here at Nymans

was to restore the rock garden and a lot of the flora that they

have in Tasmania... They have a lot of like alpine and subalpine

flora and so that would have been perfect for growing in the

rock garden.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: A plan was hatched and together with a team

from Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland and the National

Botanical Garden Of Wales in the Republic Of Ireland, Charlie and

head gardener at the time Stephen Herrington boarded a

plane to the southern hemisphere on Project BIBET, the British

and Irish botanical expedition to Tasmania.

While the team headed off on a conservation mission for public

benefit, historically, these plant hunters or plant

collectors would have been funded by private financiers

keen to flex on their foliage.

CAROLINE IKIN: Plant collecting really came to life in the 19th

century when lots of new plants were discovered in various

foreign countries.

My name is Caroline Ikin and I'm the curator at Nymans in

Standen.

People were going off to places like China and Japan where

foreigners hadn't been in before.

The borders were closed until the second half of the 19th

century and there was this great demand in Britain and elsewhere

in Europe for new and exciting plants.

Plant collectors were sent out sometimes by nurseries,

sometimes by private collectors or botanic gardens.

They brought back plants to Britain, plants and seeds which

really changed the face of gardens. They were able to plant

colourful bedding plant schemes with some of these exotic plants

coming back.

They were able to fill their glass houses with orchids and

other unusual plants and tropical specimens. They were

able to plant arboretums, so these fantastic new types of fir

trees and monkey puzzle trees were coming back. So there was

all sorts of new opportunities for gardening.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: For Charlie, our modern day collector, a love

for collecting specimens began at a young age, although these

were rarely plants.

CHARLIE BANCROFT: No, oh no, no, no! My Dad had an allotment and

I hated going! Like really hated it!

But always like being interested in the outdoors and nature. When

we used to go on walks, I just used to collect anything and

bring it home like sheep skulls and bones of things or anything

that I'd collect and then my mum would have to be trying to clean

it because we brought it home.

I always think the plant that got me interested in

horticulture was a Fritillaria or Snakeshead and they're purple

and white checkerboard- I don't know if you've seen them? Like a

bell-like flower.

Real, like how did nature decide to create this thing with these

squares of white and purple? Like it just seems totally

crazy.

Yeah, Dad finds it hilarious that I do it for a job now and I

hated it and, yeah, have kind of got into it from a second

career. But I totally fell into it, but I feel like I was

probably meant to fall into it somehow, yeah.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Arriving in Miena, the BIBET team were

joined by members from the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, the

lowdown on local flora and to get the essentials for the

adventure.

CHARLIE BANCROFT: So we met up with them, I think they just

wanted to check that we had everything that we kind of

needed, like herbarium presses for collecting the herbariums

and you need lots of bags or envelopes for seed collecting.

And then you need to be able to process that seed in the

evening.

And also because it was the botanic garden they had like

their native plant section so I just like kind of just went

straight there and just thought this is where you need we need

to be kind of just looking.

Because although we'd done research before we went

everything was just online or in books I hadn't actually seen

anything and so yeah it was just trying to just soak up that

before you're on the road.

The good thing about a botanic garden is that everything's

labelled, so you look at the plant and then you immediately

look at the label to see what it is.

Obviously when you're in the field nothing's labelled, you're

just having to identify it as much as you can at that time.

A lot of plants are endemic to Tasmania so I wouldn't have seen

them anywhere else necessarily, so the whole process of being

out was a total-

A kind of new experience for me that I was just seeing plants

that, just to look round to think, I don't recognise

anything here.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: After a few days training in the bag, the

BIBET team ventured out. Their first stop, Lake Augusta, a

shimmering body of water flanked by alpine parabolic sand dunes,

an extremely rare habitat that's been formed by winds over many

centuries.

With local guide James Wood from Tasmania's seed bank at her

side, back in 2018, Charlie discovered what makes this place

unique and why it was an essential stop for Harold

Comber.

JAMES WOOD: What's really fascinating about this area that

we're in now is that we are sitting on the edge of an alpine

sand dune system. So sand dunes are things people tend to think

of being as coastal, but you can get alpine sand dune systems.

They're not very common.

But Lake Augusta is one of those spots you go to and that really

houses a really interesting and quite diverse, quite unique

community vegetation here and there's a number of plants that

really only occur in this area.

There's a number of rare and threatened species that occur in

this area as well. There's also some fairly unique insects that

live in this area.

CHARLIE BANCROFT: Tasmania doesn't have kind of high

mountains but we were collecting higher up rather than at the

lowlands because it doesn't get as cold there as it does in the

UK. So obviously we wanted to collect the hardiest plants that

we could.

So if you collect higher up, they're obviously going to be

experiencing colder temperatures. So hopefully

hardier for UK gardens.

We were always kind of climbing up somewhere. And so you would

get to these plateaus and it was almost like a painting. There

would always be like a lake and then you would have these

shrubs, almost as if they'd been planted specifically there.

Probably say this about every spot, but it was just beautiful.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Having spent the day hiking around Lake

Augusta and its sand dune system, the next challenge for

the team was vertically, towards the summit of Projection Bluff,

a notable peak within the mountain ranges of Tasmania.

It's there that head gardener Stephen Herrington was hot on

the trail of a rare blue and pink poppy collected by Harold

Comber.

STEPHEN HERRINGTON: So we've been climbing for an hour or so

now and we're virtually at the top of the summit, probably

about 1300 metres. I've just spotted this amazing Olearia

Phlogopappa.

So Comber collected this when he was out here in 1930 and he

actually collected a pink and blue form but it's not really

out here much anymore we haven't seen it so we're hoping to catch

it again as we go up.

But i'm just gonna-

So this is it's kind of a daisy bush on the side of the mountain

here but you can just see for absolutely miles right across

the the country.

CHARLIE BANCROFT: Stephen was amazing to go with because he'd

get really excited like all of us about everything that we saw.

It wasn't too strenuous but I think obviously you're getting

really excited about the plants so you're darting about rather

rather than just going straight up. Your trajectory is a little

bit wiggled.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: A few days in, it was starting to dawn on the

team how lucky they were to be living in modern times with

relatively easy access compared with the earlier expeditions.

CHARLIE BANCROFT: When you read his diary, Tasmania wasn't as

easy accessible as when he was there. A lot of the time he was

on horseback or just trekking, whereas we could get roads to

certain places and we had cars.

And, like, the bush is just like a thick-

It's impenetrable to try and get through so for him like and he

talks about that so much that it was just really difficult to

actually access certain places so in a way we had it a bit a

bit easier I think and also with like modern technology and

things and but yeah for him I just think quite a feat to

undertake.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The reliance on botanists from abroad is

nothing new and is something Harold Comber will have had to

hand but it's only really in the modern day that the local

experts are celebrated.

Britain and its gardeners had the weight of an empire behind

them, so the recognition of local knowledge was often an

afterthought, as Caroline Ikin explains.

CAROLINE IKIN: When the plant collectors were going abroad,

they would plan their trip to certain areas to target

particular plants usually, and they would in advance make

contact with botanic gardens. Perhaps local colonial

administrators who would help them with the logistics of their

planning, because they were often going into quite literally

uncharted territory.

So they were very reliant on local people and local knowledge

to guide them to where the plants were growing, to guide

them over, you know, streams and mountains and treacherous

terrain.

The local people of the area are really the unrecognised heroes

of these plant collecting expeditions.

They were the ones with the knowledge and the expertise. And

without them facilitating the plant collecting trips, then

really, you know, they would have been much less successful.

I think nowadays, we tend to think of the plant collectors as

heroic types, generally men who braved all sorts of personal

hardships and physical hardships in the pursuit of collecting

these plants. And I think there certainly was a bit of that,

they were clearly very determined individuals.

But we have tended to forget the reliance on the local people to

help them.

Often these people are unrecorded, we don't know their

names, we don't know much about them, but we certainly know they

were there helping, and without their help, none of this would

have been possible.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Recordings of the local people were not the

only thing that was often overlooked by the collectors.

CAROLINE IKIN: Also, a lot of these collectors were going into

parts of the world where they didn't really have permission to

be.

Often they were deliberately sneaking over borders to collect

in places like Tibet, where they're sort of political

differences and they shouldn't really have been there. So they

were breaking the rules a bit in pursuit of these plants.

And when the plants came back to Britain, there was this sense

that they'd suddenly been discovered.

But of course, these plants had been known forever in their

countries of origin. They'd been used by local people. They might

have had medicinal uses or culinary uses.

And all that knowledge was really unrecorded and forgotten

when the plants came back to Britain.

And they were seen as these great new discoveries, new

plants in Britain. So there was a certain amount of kind of

whitewashing of the origins of these plants and the peoples who

would use them in their native lands.

And there's also the environmental destruction.

I mean, they weren't just taking one or two seeds from plants,

they were literally collecting thousands of seeds. There's

records of taking tens of thousands of bulbs, so literally

wiping out single species from different parts of the hillside

or the countryside where these things were growing.

So there are some sort of problematic environmental and

cultural things that we need to think about when we're

celebrating these plant collectors today, because yes,

they brought an awful lot of benefit to British horticulture,

but some of it was at the expense of some of the other

countries in the empire and beyond where these plant

collectors were operating.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: As well as the challenges presented by the

landscape, the team also had to go toe-to-toe, quite literally,

with the local wildlife, coming face-to-face with an egg-laying

mammal and a bloodthirsty creature lurking in the long

grasses. As the team recalled back at their base.

JAMES WOOD: And we actually saw an echidna on the way back,

which is, I think, a bonus.

Don't often get to see an egg-laying mammal, but just

wandering alongside the road, which is a nice bonus at the end

of the day, heading back home.

CHARLIE BANCROFT: Yeah, but what wasn't such a bonus was the

leeches. No, I don't think anybody survived-

STEPHEN HERRINGTON: No, everybody got the leeches!

Yeah, so-

JAMES WOOD: It's not a real Tasmanian bush experience if you

haven't picked up several leeches and filled one of your

socks full of blood. So, yeah, that's all part of the

experience.

CHARLIE BANCROFT: The button grass is a beautiful grass that

they've got out there and the flower does look like a button.

It's very dense grass and it grows in wet, almost like a

peaty moorland and so it thrives with leeches.

And obviously the first time we didn't know that and we went in

there collecting and then someone was like, oh, I've got

something on me.

And then before you knew it, everyone had the leeches

everywhere, which the leeches were small and they weren't a

problem.

I think what was a problem was you didn't know where they'd

gotten. Later that day, you were still finding leeches.

Yeah. But in terms of a lot of the things that we could have

encountered in Tasmania, leeches were nothing and I think we did

get quite gung-ho because you are just putting your hand in a

shrub to collect the seed and that becomes the norm.

And we did see a few snakes as we were walking but only a few

times that you did kind of get a bit blasé about it and think, oh

yeah, this is fine.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: One of the plants that first caught

Charlie's eye was like something from another planet.

CHARLIE BANCROFT: Well, they have like these Richea

Pandanifolia and they're just like massive columns, really and

then it just has this crazy bit of foliage at the top.

And I remember Harold Comber just saying how alien they are

and how they don't look like anything else that should be in

that habitat because most of the flora is like-

You've got the Eucalyptus and you've got Nothofagus, which is

a very small tree in comparison to eucalyptus and then you've

got a lot of scrub, so a lot of shrubs and things.

And then you've got this Richea Pandanifolia, which is just

totally just this column that just sticks out. So yeah, that

was crazy to see.

CAROLINE IKIN: Plant collecting has really changed the face of

gardens in Britain.

I mean, there's no doubt about it that these new plants coming

in from abroad gave all sorts of new possibilities in terms of

garden design, in terms of building up collections of trees

in arboretums, in terms of creating great show glasshouses

full of orchids and tropical plants, creating big bedding

schemes and parterres.

All these things were made possible because of the new

plants that were suddenly flooding the market.

But of course, now there are much tighter controls on plants

that can be brought in, in terms of giving recognition and some

benefit to the countries that they're coming from and those

peoples that live in some of those places.

Plants are now quarantined when they come into Britain, whereas

in the past, they just came in in their wardian cases, which is

the plant cases that they brought them over with, with

soil from other countries, with plant material, with bugs and

worms and everything in the soil.

Was all coming back to Britain and you can imagine the sort of

damage that that was causing, introducing pests and pathogens

that weren't known to Britain before.

Now when plant collectors do go out, there's all sorts of

regulations and things put in place so that we minimise

environmental damage to Britain and to the countries that we're

taking material from.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Today, collectors will still be

furnishing private collections and nurseries but there is also

a new wave of plant lovers whose goal is to protect the rarest of

the rare and to prolong the continuation of plant species in

the growing battle against climate change.

Gardens across the world are changing and it's only with

expert knowledge that we can work together to ensure that

they can still be enjoyed for years to come.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Wild Tales. If you

want to discover more, then be sure to check out the links in

our show notes, where you'll find loads of info about the

botanic gardens mentioned and find a deep dive report into the

trip.

For more from Wild Tales, follow us on your favourite podcast app

and if you really loved this episode, then you can hear it

again next week by following our sister show, Back When, where

James Grasby will be taking you on an adventure through natural

history. See you next time.