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 a really cool and damp and it's

just amazing kind of environment to walk around and so different

to the environments that we've been to already.

JAMES GRASBY : Have you ever imagined being a fly on the wall

of history? Join me for an inside view of the stories of

people, places and moments that made us.

I'm historian James Grasby. Lean in for a tale from time. Back

When.

This story is one that has been growing with us for a long time,

with the seeds being sown almost a hundred years ago. It takes

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

bridges, waterfalls, and poisonous plant life.

Welcome to the 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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 the 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

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 sub-alpine flora and and so

that would have been perfect for growing in the rock garden.

JAMES GRASBY : A plan was hatched and together with a team

from Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland, the National Botanical

Gardens Of Wales and 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, and 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 glasshouses with orchids and

other unusual plants and tropical specimens.

They were able to plant arboretum, 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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's 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 snake's head.

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, I have kind of got into it from a second

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

probably meant to fall into it somehow. Yeah.

JAMES GRASBY : Arriving in Miena, the BIBET team were

joined by members from the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens for

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 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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 has been formed by the winds over

many centuries.

With local guide James Wood from Tasmania Seed Bank at her side

in 2018, Charlie discovered what makes this place unique and 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.

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.

I'd probably say this about every spot, but it was just

beautiful.

JAMES GRASBY : 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 of Nymans during the expedition,

Stephen Harrington, 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 1,300 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 going to-

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

here. But you can just see for absolutely miles right across

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. Wasn't too strenuous but I think obviously, you're getting

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

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

wiggled.

JAMES GRASBY : 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 feet to undertake.

JAMES GRASBY : The reliance on botanists from abroad is nothing

new and is something Harold Comber will have hand to hand.

But it's only really in the modern day that the local

experts have been 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 and

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 and to guide

them over streams and mountains and treacherous terrain.

The local people of the area 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.

JAMES GRASBY : Recordings of the local people were not the only

thing that were 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 there's 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 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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.

STEPHEN HERRINGTON: 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 yeah,

just wandering alongside the road, which is… a nice bonus at

the end of the day heading back home.

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

it were the leeches!

I don't think anyone survived-

STEPHEN HERRINGTON: No everybody got the leeches!

JAMES WOOD: It's not a 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 the problem was you didn't know where they'd

gotten later that day and 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 you kind of

just, 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.

JAMES GRASBY : One of the plants that first caught Charlie's eye

was like something from another planet.

CHARLIE BANCROFT: Well, they have like these, they're called

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.

You know, 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Back When. Be the

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And while you're there, and if you've enjoyed this episode,

then you can hear it again on our sister show, Wild Tales with

Rosie Holdsworth.

Join us again next time for more tales from time. Back When.