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.