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CONVERSATION SERIES

PP_web_cs_intro_David_Monacchi_Yasuni_Brazil_2
David Monacchi recording in primary forest in Yasunì, Ecuador in 2016.

Photograph by Alex D’Emilia. Courtesy the photographer and the project Fragments of Extinction.

The collections of early botanical conservatories relied on plant specimens brought back home by naturalists who participated in exploratory expeditions. In this series of conversations, we gathered “field notes” from a different type of a collective expedition. Rather than bringing back plants, we speculated with botanists, ecologists, gardeners, herbalists, chefs, artists, designers, and philosophers to plant seeds for a new way of thinking. We strove to understand what future plant-human relations could be forged if we let ourselves be, once again, enchanted by plants.

Since giving spatial form to problems is the architects’ forte, we also speculated with our guests about potential futures for the closed worlds of botany as metaphorical “thought incubators.” What else can a conservatory function as? A memorial? A pantry? A sanatorium? A synthesizer? Or, perhaps, a temple? While it would be naïve to assume that rethinking the future of botanical conservatories can help us revive our relationship with the non-human life, this thought experiment offered us a way to meditate on the transformative power of plants.

After all, greenhouses are ever more pervasive, and we continue to build larger and larger glass-worlds. Yet, conservation is only the most recent raison d'être of botanical conservatories. Early botanical gardens and glasshouses were built to satisfy practical needs, economic aspirations, scientific curiosity, and simply the pursuit of beauty. Today, next to conducting conservation projects, they increasingly focus on education (albeit in form of leisure). Still, what exactly do they educate us about whilst our understanding of plant life continues to evolve? Which parts of plant life do they highlight? Which aspects of ecological relationships do they leave out? How are plants arranged under glass to tell a story? And exactly which story? Whose story?

Phyto-Intelligence

PP web conversations image_Steven Shaviro Fuligo septica_OK
Oliver Kellhammer, Slime Mold Oracle, 2013. Fuligo septica in the artist’s backyard.

Courtesy the artist.

The lens for this conversation is phyto-intelligence: a way to think about alternative modes of cognition.

I am talking to Steven Shaviro.

— Aleksandra Jaeschke

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Steven Shaviro is a writer and cultural critic whose areas of interest include film theory, science fiction, capitalism, panpsychism, process-based philosophy, and speculative realism. He earned a PhD from Yale University and is currently DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit. He previously taught film, culture, and english at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Among his many books, Connected or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (2003) looks at how our networked environments have manifested themselves in science fiction. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (2009) is Shaviro’s experiment in rethinking the postmodern theory of aesthetics by imagining a world in which Alfred North Whitehead takes the place of Martin Heidegger. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (2014) explores speculative thought that moves beyond human-centered perception of nature. His most recent book, Discognition (2016), looks at science-fiction novels and stories that explore extreme human and alien sentience.

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  • Your book Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics is a thought experiment; you call it a philosophical fantasy. You ask: “What if Whitehead, instead of Heidegger, had set the agenda for postmodern thought,” and then: “What different questions might we be asking?” The questions would most likely start with “how” rather than “why,” but why are these questions important and how do you think they would have affected postmodern thought, especially as related to aesthetics?

    Aleksandra Jaeschke

  • My premise in the book was just that we would be asking different questions, and I used it as a symbol that Heidegger says, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and Whitehead says, “How is it possible for things to change?”

    Steven Shaviro

  • Much more exciting…

    AJ

  • Well, this is an exaggeration, but ultimately, who cares why is there something rather nothing? It’s something that we have to deal with.

    SS

  • That’s why I wanted to talk about this book.

    AJ

  • What can we do with this something? How can it be generative instead of oppressive? Here’s a concrete example, though it’s a little intuitive; I haven’t fully worked it out. Have you been talking about the philosopher, Michael Marder?

    SS

  • No, we haven’t.

    AJ

  • Okay, Michael Marder . . . He’s interested in how plants are ontologically different from us, which is close to what I understand you’re asking about here. His first book is called Plant Thinking, and it talks about how plants definitely have a kind of relation to the outside world. They have intentionality in a phenomenological sense, but they don’t have a unified ego; it’s hard to say where the plant stops and where it starts. They’re intertwined; they’re much more networked . . . He talks about how plant being and plant thinking are kind of non-appropriative and ethical forms of existence. And there are exceptions—there are carnivorous plant, and parasitic plants, etc.—but one thing that startled me when I read his books, and so I asked him about it when I saw him at a lecture, is that he almost never talks about photosynthesis, and the reason that’s odd is because it would totally support his thesis.

    Plants mostly produce their own food just from sunlight, as we know, and that’s central to their way of being. They don’t need to be predaceous of other living entities in order to survive, and that would seem to go very well with what Marder is talking about, and he just said, “Well, yeah, of course, that’s there, but that’s not what I focus on” . . . I didn’t pursue it with him . . . but Marder has a very phenomenological background: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and people like that. I think Whitehead would be more interested in the question of photosynthesis rather than the question about when it’s a single entity or when it’s not a single entity. For Whitehead, everything is single and multiple at the same time; everything is composed of many occasions— both spread out in space and time—so it’s kind of conscious of itself as a singular being, or acts as a single being and at the same time it’s really a multiplicity . . . There is a passage in Process and Reality where Whitehead talks about predation and how life is robbery and how living things prey on other living things, but plants don’t do that, for the most part. I think . . . that because Marder is coming out of Heidegger, not from Whitehead, is why he thinks of one question, not the other question. So, I wonder how it would be if you had a different framework in which a question like photosynthesis became the center of your speculation.

    SS

  • Sure. What’s fascinating to me is that in Whitehead’s world there actually are no independent or immutable subjects that are acting upon objects, and we all embody processes and cannot be considered in isolation from those processes. We’re not autonomous in a way. And while this attitude can trigger existential anxiety, thinking in terms of process can also be really liberating and creative, and creativity was an important concept for Whitehead.

    AJ

  • That’s really one of the big things that I always worry about. Whitehead actually popularized the use of the word creativity . . . He says that everything that happens is creative in one way or another. Even if you’re repeating something, the repetition is creative because something happening for the tenth time has a tiny difference at least from the nine other times it happened. But “creativity” is now a buzzword in every business school in the Western world . . . It goes along with “disrupting markets” and things like that. Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter said that creative destruction is a dynamic of entrepreneurial innovation and the motor of capitalism… So, it’s disturbing that creativity has become this buzzword that is used for all kinds of horrible things. For Whitehead, creativity is this almost-magical thing—something new comes into existence, you’re really expanding the world, expanding possibility, but it is also very ordinary, because everything is creative, at least to a minimal extent.

    SS

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Eco-Acoustics

PP web conversations image_David Monacchi Yasuni Ecuador
David Monacchi recording in primary forest

Yasunì, Ecuador in 2016.

Photograph by Alex D’Emilia. Courtesy the photographer and the project Fragments of Extinction.

The lens for this conversation is eco-acoustics: the study of soundscapes.

I am talking to David Monacchi.

— Aleksandra Jaeschke

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

David Monacchi is an eco-acoustic researcher, composer, and interdisciplinary artist. The recipient of multiple awards, Monacchi is pioneering a new scientific and compositional approach based on 3D-sound recordings of ecosystems to foster discourse on the biodiversity crisis through music and sound-art installations. He has collaborated with Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Foundation, and Ear to the Earth, and is a founding member of the Global Sustainable Soundscape Network and the International Society of Ecoacoustics.

A Fulbright fellow at UC Berkeley in 2007 and artistic research fellow at IRCAM-Centre Pompidou in 2018, he has taught at the University of Macerata, and is now professor of Electroacoustics at his alma mater—the Conservatorio “Rossini” of Pesaro in Italy.

For more than twenty years, Monacchi has been developing the multidisciplinary project entitled Fragments of Extinction, conducting field research in the world’s last remaining areas of primary equatorial rainforest. His award-winning documentary, Dusk Chorus, portrays his fieldwork as he embarks on a quest to record twenty-four-hour-long sonic portraits of the Amazon forest. Monacchi’s discography includes Eco-Acoustic Compositions and Prime Amazonia. He is the author of a recent book entitled L’Arca dei Suoni Originari, which means the ark of the original sounds.

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  • According to the International Society of Ecoacoustics, ecoacoustics recognizes that sound can be both the subject and tool of ecological research. So, I wanted to talk about sound as the subject of your research. One of my favorite stories is how plants are apparently capable of picking up and processing sound to distinguish, for example, between wind and insects. Perhaps because so many sounds are inaudible to the human ear, most might think that sounds play no role in the kingdom of plants. What is the most fascinating sound or the most fascinating soundscape that you have discovered during your trips?

    Aleksandra Jaeschke

  • This question is always difficult. It is hard for me to recall something specific that was extraordinary, because I tend to consider it all extraordinary, all at the same level of systemic balance.

    David Monacchi

  • That’s beautiful.

    AJ

  • Yes, I could maybe have a preference, as a person from a culture who was raised with certain sound preferences. That would make me consider the most interesting soundscape, the one that is closer to a musical behavior, meaning some of its sounds are musical sounds that we recognize as pitches. And if that is the case, I would go directly to Borneo, let’s say, the alluvial forests of Brunei and Malaysia, where you can listen to these insects that sound extremely similar to an accordion. A diatonic accordion, but they are extremely similar, it’s incredible. You’re in the middle of the forest and you hear hundreds of accordions around you and you’re just, “What?”

    DM

  • Wow. It’s almost like rediscovering the origins of music, in the primary forest.

    AJ

  • Kind of, but their behavior is not tonal. It’s microtonal. The intervals that they play with each other are not tones or semitones. We humans divided our spectrum of frequency into a discrete quantized spectrum of notes. That was our choice, as a culture. And their choice was to behave in a microtonal way, and it’s so incredibly similar to what György Ligeti from Hungary did with contemporary music, in the ’60s and ’70s, exploring that microtonal mass of sounds with the orchestra. I think that music and nature sometimes can collide in the same intuitions, let’s say. But what those insects did was not for the sake of our aesthetics. Not even for their aesthetics, at least as far as we know…

    DM

  • We don’t know…

    AJ

  • It was for the sake of life functions.

    DM

  • Communication…

    AJ

  • Communication and territorialization… Sound allows them to survive.

    DM

  • I will come back to that in a moment, but since you mentioned compositions, do you actually register natural sounds to use them as raw material for your compositions? You’re striving to preserve what you hear as well as possible using three-dimensional recording systems. How does that affect your work as a composer? Or is it that this unedited sound is what you really want to share with the audience?

    AJ

  • Well, it’s a big problem for me, because I started this project, Fragments of Extension, as a composer, but I ended up not having anything to do because manipulating those soundscapes would have destroyed them. They are already perfect as they are. So, it was a problem and a challenge for me for years. What could I do, as a composer, when exposed to such complexity and to such an internal order? Well, my figure as a composer is not needed. So, what I’m I doing with this project? Am I cutting my personality out? And the answer is, yes. In the end, I’ve cut myself outside of the picture. I’m not needed. What is needed, that you cannot substitute, is the ear of the composer in the rain forest. That’s what is needed.

    DM

  • That’s a very brave and rare position to take as an artist…

    AJ

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Bio-Aesthetics

Planet Potential Mark Dion
Mark Dion, The Life of a Dead Tree, 2019. Mixed Media. Dimensions variable.

Installation view, The Life of a Dead Tree, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, 2019.

Photo by Tom Arban Photography Inc. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.

The lens for this conversation is bio-aesthetics that is visual art that engages with non-human life.

I am talking to Mark Dion.

— Aleksandra Jaeschke

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mark Dion is an American artist. His work examines the ways in which mainstream institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. Appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between “objective” or “rational” scientific methods and “subjective” or “irrational” influences.

Dion’s work has received numerous recognitions, including the 2008 Lucelia Award from Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in 2005, and the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 2001.

His now-35-year-long artistic journey has been punctuated by countless exhibitions. To name a few of the most notable ones: The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit held at the Miami Art Museum in 2006; Rescue Archaeology: A Project at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2004; and Tate Thames Dig at the Tate Gallery in London in 1999. Dion’s 2006 Neukom Vivarium, a permanent installation and learning lab commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum and housed in a custom-built greenhouse, is open to visitors at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle.

Mark received a bachelor in fine arts and an honorary doctorate from the University of Hartford School of Art in Connecticut.

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  • I wanted to talk a little bit about the Neukom Vivarium, which is this permanent installation in Seattle. Did you look for the tree or did it find you?

    Aleksandra Jaeschke

  • Oh, my goodness! We searched for that tree for almost two years.

    Mark Dion

  • Oh, really? Can you tell us about it? How did the search start?

    AJ

  • . . . I spent a lot of time there, I really didn’t know that region very well, and it was incredibly eye-opening for me, as someone who spends a lot of time outside, who used to live in the forest. I’ve known forests all my life, but I’ve never known a North American primary forest, and certainly not a temperate rainforest. So, this was an enormously influential experience for me. Another interesting element is that Seattle is such a young city that the European settlement of Seattle is all post-photography. So, you can really follow the development of the city from a very natural place to the megalopolis it is now through images and see things as dramatic as the regrading of the city, which are just extraordinary feats of ecological disruption. Another thing that was really important to me is the general ecological literacy of people in Seattle… I’d never experienced that anywhere I’d ever been, in terms of people having incredible knowledge about where they’re living and about the kind of place they’re living and the plants and animals that they share that space with. Those decades and decades of environmental education that they’ve done with kids have really paid this incredible dividend of a general population that just knows about this stuff in a way that is very sophisticated and intelligent . . .

    So, as I was researching, I came across this phenomenon of the nurse log. In a system like a rainforest, and a rainforest that’s in a very hilly mountainous region, of course, this place is getting 160 inches of rain a year, so you’d imagine all the nutrients wash out to sea pretty quickly, except for the fact that nutrients are bound in the plants themselves. So, all the energy of the forest is stored in the forest, not in the soil necessarily. And when one of those giant trees dies, it immediately begins to release that energy and the next generation of forest grows right on top of it, immediately. And it takes these trees as long to break down as it does to grow. So, a 180-year-old tree is going to still be releasing that energy in over 180 years. And so, the next generation of forests is going to mature right on top. And when you walk through, not on the paths of these forests, but through the forest, you realize that you’re walking on top of layer and layer, and layer, and layer of trees. So, I wanted to take one of these nurse logs, like an ambassador from the forest, back into the heart of the city, where we would have found it maybe 98 years ago or something.

    MD

  • So, it was a search. It was not something that happened by chance.

    AJ

  • Yeah… We had a few target species, because there are some trees that are extremely resistant to rotting, like cypress. And we needed to find a tree that was big enough. We couldn’t find a tree. We needed to find a tree we could access . . . Now, some of the people who sponsor the Seattle Art Museum are the very same people who are destroying the last of these forests, and so, those companies were very eager to help us, but we didn’t want their help, because we didn’t want this to be a brainwashing exercise. So, we also couldn’t get a tree from them or use their technology. First, we had to find a place that was ethically okay to take a tree from, and we approached the National Forest. They said the paperwork to get a tree from the National Forest, out of the National Forest, would stretch from Seattle to Washington DC and back and would come back “No.” So, we knew we couldn’t do that, but we did find that around Seattle there is a very extensive network of protected watersheds. And these watersheds have a mixed-use policy, but they also have an education mandate, which they don’t necessarily always fulfill. So, we were able to get a tree based on that from one of these watersheds. And we finally located a tree that was close enough to the road, because we also didn’t wanna build a road to get a tree or cause any more mischief. And so, we found one, we knew exactly when it came down. It was the right species, it was in the right condition, and then we had to move it, which was another complication…

    MD

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Phyto-Materials

PP web conversations image_Hanaa Dahy Hemp Chair
Hemp Chair by Sachin Gupta and Andre Kauffman.

Hanaa Dahy-led Design Studio: Material and Structure, SS 16, University of Stuttgart.

Photograph by Gupta and Kauffman.

The lens for this conversation is phyto-materials—plant-based material resources—for design.

I am talking to Hanaa Dahy.

— Aleksandra Jaeschke

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Hanaa Dahy is a registered architect, engineer, and material developer. She received her PhD from the Institute for Building Structures and Structural Design at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and earned her bachelor and master’s degrees in architectural engineering from Ain Shams University in Cairo. Prior to her move to Germany, she practiced as an independent architect in Egypt and the Middle East. Dahy is now a Junior Professor at the Stuttgart Institute for Building Structures and Structural Design where she founded and directs her own research department called BioMat. The work of BioMat focuses on bio-based materials and material cycles in architecture.

Dahy’s work addresses applications and implications of sustainable and biomimetic principles for material development, structural engineering, and architectural practice. She has designed, developed, and manufactured several innovative building products that were exhibited and recognized internationally. She holds several European and international patents. In 2015, she received the Best of Materialica Design + Technology Award from eMove360º, and in 2016 her work was recognized with the Material Prize from the Design Center of the German state of Baden-Württemberg.

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  • You’ve mentioned the textile industry and I wanted you to talk about some of the methods that you’ve adopted from it. For example, in one of your projects, FibRfoldR, you talk about the tailored fiber placement. Does this method come from the textile industry and how does it work?

    Aleksandra Jaeschke

  • That’s a mix from the textile industry and the aircraft industry. And how does it work? It works just how we make cloth, but it’s automated. It’s an additive manufacturing process. We align the fibers and stitch them automatically to a background of stretched fibers or a membrane in directions that we have pre-assigned according to the parametric format that we have already optimized…

    Hanaa Dahy

  • Structurally optimized, right?

    AJ

  • Yes, structurally optimized depending on a specific load case, depending on what kind of application we want and what kind of forces are flowing. This will affect the orientation and placement of the fibers, and that’s why this is called tailored fiber placement format. And this came to our knowledge after collaborating with other industries, including the two I’ve just mentioned, the textile and the aircraft industries.

    HD

  • I imagine that the methods that don’t require a formwork, like the coreless filament winding, also came from those industries.

    AJ

  • Exactly—comparing the automotive and aircraft design methods to the architecture and building industry—we can learn a lot from those fields.

    HD

  • Of course. They are way more advanced because weight is critical in aircraft design . . . You mentioned some of the fibers that you work with when using these methods. When I think of the important differences between wood fibers and annual plant fibers, I think of their length. Of course, all plant cells are longer in the direction parallel to the axis of their growth, but if I’m not wrong, wood fibers are much shorter than flax, hemp or jute fibers that can be even ten times longer. I wonder how this fact affects the potential applications. Would it be possible for you to design something like your Flex-Flax or Hemp Chair with wood fibers or is it really all based on the potential of those particular fibers?

    AJ

  • Timber is different. If you take a cross-section of the trunk … There are so many graphs that describe how when you cut it in certain directions, you get expansion or shrinkage in certain directions… If you want to make a cross-laminated timber beam, you need to cut this naturally growing biocomposite in a specific way. So, the way you cut it will depend on the kind of timber product you want to obtain . . . And because it’s a very old, a well-known building resource, this is well-established knowledge … Still, we are rediscovering its potential and things are happening very rapidly now . . . but the problem with timber is that it’s not available worldwide. It’s also responsible for absorbing carbon dioxide emissions . . . so you cannot depend on it endlessly. And, its growth is very slow…

    HD

  • It takes ages to grow, right?

    AJ

  • Yes. It’s a very slow renewable resource, you cannot rely on it in all cases, and so the alternative for it could be the residues from cereal crops already grown for food. For example, when you’re harvesting wheat, you have the excess straw. Part of it can be used on the land but part of it will need to be used elsewhere because the soil won’t be able to absorb the nutrients from it all before the farmers have to use the land again. We are able to use this excess of agro-fibers in our field. There are limitations, of course, because most of these fibers are short fibers, but the longer ones that have more possibility to compete with glass fibers and carbon fibers can be used to make structural elements . . . Of course, it depends on what we want to do. If we want to create timber beams, then we can make a hybrid system between longer fibers like hemp, for instance, and thinner timber elements to achieve what we need without using thicker timber pieces. Or, we can make a biocomposite mixture between longer fibers of hemp or flax, or jute, for instance, and shorter fibers of straw. There are so many ways to exactly define what kind of resource you need to use and if there is no other way than using timber, you can still reduce the cross-section by including other kinds of natural fibers as reinforcement.

    HD

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Ecosystem Services

PP web conversations image_Kate Kennen Multi mechanism buffer
Multi-mechanism buffer

Courtesy Kate Kennen and Offshoots Inc.

The lens for this conversation is ecosystem services: the benefits that we draw from natural systems, plants included.

I am talking to Kate Kennen.

— Aleksandra Jaeschke

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Kate Kennen is a registered Landscape Architect with degrees from Cornell University and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

She has been in independent practice since 2006 when she founded Kennen Landscape Architecture. She is now the president of Offshoots, which she established in 2012 to focus on productive planting and ecological planning. Kate’s current research and teaching concentrate on planting design and applied phytotechnologies that utilize plants to clean up contaminated sites. Her book, PHYTO: Principles and Resources for Site Remediation and Landscape Design—co-authored with Niall Kirkwood—received a national honor award from the American Society of Landscape Architects and was the winner of the 2017 Literature Award of Excellence in Landscape Design and Architecture given by the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries.

In parallel to her practice and research, Kate is on the landscape architecture faculty at Northeastern University in Boston and has taught seminars on phytoremediation at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Having spent her childhood at her family’s garden center in central Massachusetts, Kate is well-versed in the plants and ecological systems of the Northeast. She is still involved in her family nursery business based in Paxton, MA.

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  • Your specific expertise focuses on the capacity of plants to regulate natural processes. This means purifying water, remediating soil, decomposing and detoxifying waste, but also, I imagine, sequestering carbon and preventing floods. The book that you co-authored with Niall focuses on soil- and site remediation. Can you explain a bit more about what phytoremediation means and how it works?

    Aleksandra Jaeschke

  • Sure. The term phytoremediation was coined back in the late ’80s by Dr. Rufus Chaney. He was working at the USDA, and he had been looking at different kinds of plant species and realized that some plants take up more metals than other plants. And he asked if we could actually plant certain species that have these abilities. They’re called hyper-accumulating plants and they uptake metals more than other plants. Could we employ them out on contaminated sites to remediate or mitigate the contaminants in situ? Phytoremediation is about having a spill—having some sort of polluted landscape—and then employing a planting strategy to clean it up. I get excited about that, of course, but we have realized since then that it is not a silver bullet. Many of the things that Dr. Chaney originally thought would be great, turned out, well…You know what? We can’t use sunflowers to do lead remediation. We can’t do a lot of this type of remediation because the compounds are so attached to soil that we can’t get them into the plants. Even though we may find a hyper-accumulator, we might not be able to utilize it on a particular site or the fit might not be great.

    I get excited about following the peer-reviewed literature in the phytoremediation field and then appling those principles to design practice. We work to prophylactically or preventatively buffer future contamination from happening. It’s not about remediation, per se, but about using plants in a preventive way to stop contamination along roadways and within all the industrial or urban uses that we know are polluting . . .

    Kate Kennen

  • It seems that these techniques are all relatively recent discoveries. Are there any precedents? I’ve been talking to chefs and herbalists and people who work with plants who are learning a lot from Indigenous cultures when it comes to using plants for cooking and medicinal purposes. Is there any type of Indigenous knowledge that you as a landscape architect can tap into, or is it all just modern science?

    AJ

  • I won’t specifically say that I’ve tapped into Indigenous research because I have not, but there’s definitely historic precedence. Say, for example, gold miners, when they were looking for spots of gold, would look for certain plant species because the make-up of the soil is different for certain plant communities than others, and they were almost identifying features. It’s as if you can read a landscape and what the soil matrix might be by the plant community, and so that was very much used in historic mining practices all over the world. That’s one example I know of. I’m sure there are others.

    KK

  • So that’s like saying that the plant is a type of a signaling device to communicate the presence of certain substances. Something that you can observe with the naked eye—perhaps even a change in the plant pigmentation? Or is it simply about certain species being present in the landscape?

    AJ

  • Both. There’s a great example from the Flanders area in Belgium where they were zinc mining for a long time. Much of the area is highly contaminated with cadmium, which is a by-product of zinc mining. Well, I was walking around with one of the phytoremediation scientists from the University of Hasselt, Jaco Vangronsveld (he is a pioneer in this research), and he said, “Kate, look at all the sea thrift everywhere,” and I was like, “Yeah, that’s such a beautiful plant. I love it. I use it in my garden.” He asked, “Have you noticed where it is growing?” And I didn’t, really. It was growing where nothing else was growing, in these highly contaminated soils… It was the one plant that could live in the cadmium soil. You can ask the plant itself or the plant community.

    KK

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Culinary Arts

PP web conversations image_Jude Mayall Wattleseed 2
Wattleseed Pods

From Chef Jude Mayall’s Wild Food Farm trees turn from green to brown before opening to reveal black wattleseed ready to be roasted and milled.

Courtesy the Wild Food Farm.

The lens for this conversation is culinary arts: the art of food preparation using plant, animal, and man-made products.

I am talking to Jude Mayall.

— Aleksandra Jaeschke

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jude Mayall is the founder and main chef behind The Outback Chef, a leading supplier of Australian bush herbs, spices, and fruits. Jude holds a diploma from the Confectionery Acadamie in Solingen, Germany and has worked for many years within the confectionery industry, but her adventure with Australia’s native bush food—known as bush tucker—started thanks to her involvement in Aboriginal art. Working with Indigenous artists allowed her to gain knowledge about bush tucker and fueled a desire to pursue the research further. The Outback Chef was a natural fruit of this work. For over fifteen years, Jude has collaborated closely with foragers, local farmers, and Indigenous communities to source native products. When she first started, Jude said, “no one wanted to know” about Indigenous Australian flavors. Jude’s work has catalyzed a wave of new acceptance of Australian native plants, foraged ingredients, and Indigenous culture.

In 2020, she opened the doors to the Wild Food Farm on Phillip Island, located near Melbourne, where she now grows many of the native plants that she works with.

Jude is the author of The Outback Chef cookbook that showcases native Australian foods, their provenance, and their spiritual significance to the Indigenous people of Australia. She is an industry leader and active educator.

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  • . . . You are not only a chef and a confectioner, but also a trusted supplier of Indigenous food. Can you please tell us about how you source the products? Do you forage yourself?  If not, who works for you?

    Aleksandra Jaeschke:

  • Going back to about 2005 when Outback Chef first started, I really was very much dependent on growers, farmers, wild harvesters, and certainly Indigenous communities who are foraging for food. It’s grown a lot more since then as the demand for food has grown, and people want to know where their food comes from. That’s the biggest thing I’ve noticed, say in the last five or six years: this desire to know… Where is this grown? What part of the country? Where does it come from? And has it been ethically sourced? People want to know a lot more about that . . . I think it’s great that those questions are being answered. So, I don’t do so much foraging. I let other people do that. . .

    Jude Mayall

  • You’ve mentioned your farm, the Wild Food Farm, which you acquired recently. Is this a way for you to get closer to the land? Are you now able to grow some of the plants that you work with on the farm? How does it work now?

    AJ

  • I’m still very dependent on foragers, farmers, growers, and Indigenous communities. I’ve also been around a while now, so I’ve got a lot of chefs that I supply to, a lot of distillers, food manufacturers—and a lot of people now are looking for native food. They’re finding that it’s a selling point. My property could never, ever produce enough for them. For example, with strawberry gum—that’s a eucalyptus, it’s beautiful. Just imagine a green leaf that is harvested, dried, and milled, and then used for its flavor, and the essential oils going through the food. I’ve got an order in at the moment, and it’s only for a small amount of dried strawberry gum, but that’s a few hundred kilos of leaf that has to be harvested and dried.

    JM

  • That will come from your farm?

    AJ

  • No, it can’t, so I bring that down from northern New South Wales. The same with wattleseed. Wattleseed is very popular. It’s high in nutrients, in proteins, and it’s just a tiny, little black seed that comes in a long pod that grows from the trees, and it’s harvested and then dried,  milled, and roasted just like coffee beans. And we end up with a powder. I go through maybe a ton of that a year. That sort of things is massive, so we’re still very, very dependent on the wild harvesters. Plus, the fact is that I’ve been supporting these people for a long time, and that’s not going to change. I’ll continue to support the harvesters living in remote communities because I think it’s important . . . We work together, yes, we’re business partners, but there’s a certain amount of support. There’s always a lot of talk when you ring them up and you get to know them; you talk about the weather, you talk about all the usual stuff, but you do get to know them very well. So, it’s nice, I do love those linkups…

    JM

  • It extends the farm, right? The country’s an extended farm.

    AJ

  • Extends it and it makes what you’re doing really lovely. To have that communication, I really like that. I like to talk to someone… It might be up in Arnhem Land, “What’s happening up there?” “Oh, we’ve done this… ” And it’s just local, chit-chatty gossip, but you become good friends with those people, so it’s business and there’s also a lot of pleasure…

    JM

  • And community.

    AJ

  • Community life. Really a nice way to go about doing it, I think.

    JM

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Herbalism

PP web conversations image_Paul Strauss Goldenseal Harvest
Paul Strauss

With goldenseal root harvest.

Photograph by Lonnie Galt-Theis.

The lens for this conversation is herbalism: the art of healing with plants.

I am talking to Paul Strauss.

— Aleksandra Jaeschke

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Paul Strauss is a farmer, herbalist, beekeeper, and teacher. Traditional college studies were not for Paul. After the Woodstock gathering, he headed cross-country to California. His travels in the Southwest took him to New Mexico, where he learned of medicinal plants from a Shoshone man. He spent time studying plants on Hopi and Navajo reservations and lived for long periods of time in both Sycamore Canyon Wilderness Area and Superstition Wilderness Area in Arizona.

Upon hearing of the availability of inexpensive land in Southeast Ohio, Paul purchased eighty acres in 1970. He has spent over forty years rebuilding the farm and reclaiming land that was strip-mined for coal. Using the local wild woodland and field herbs, Paul created medicines that grew in popularity among his friends. In response to this demand, he eventually built an apothecary, and created Equinox Botanicals.

In an effort to protect the unique habitat of the area, Paul bought up land surrounding the farm. In 1998, he donated seventy acres to help create the first United Plant Savers Botanical Sanctuary. Today, Equinox Farm and Botanical Sanctuary Farm hold about 300 acres of farm, forest, and prairie and are part of a larger collective of nearly 3,000 acres.

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  • At some point, you decided to donate a big portion of your land to United Plant Savers. Can you tell us more about this organization and how it operates?

    Aleksandra Jaeschke

  • Well, I can tell you how it came about. When I moved to this farm, there were some local farmers that became really interested in who I was and what I was doing. And they knew these plants—mostly the plants that were worth money: ginseng, goldenseal, some of the cohoshes, and of course ramps. And these people took me under their wings . . . On the Wood farm, which was the botanical sanctuary, they wanted me to help them with all their farming activities . . . Lee Wood, the older guy, grew up in West Virginia, and when he was young, he couldn’t even afford a pair of shoes, so he had a hard time making good decisions about how he was going to get money and, oh, it’s a bad story, but I’ll just put it out there. He took out a loan from a strip miner in Jackson, Ohio because he wanted money, basically. He lost the loan, and they had the right—this company from Jackson, Ohio—to come in and take every piece of timber, small or large, off the farm. And I had two weeks to do something about it, because this company was going to get paid back any way they had to. It was a very trying time for me, but lucky enough, I have good friends and I’ve got an abundant amount of energy, and tthe last day we got up the money we needed to purchase the whole farm that I had been brought up on by the Wood family, who totally adopted me. I knew all about the herbs on that farm just from working there. That farm probably has the largest goldenseal stand in America, and because the soil’s so good, it was strip mined, but it has been reclaimed now . . .

    Paul Strauss

  • Is this the land that you donated to United Plant Savers?

    AJ

  • I donated seventy acres of my land to the United Plant Savers, and then when my friend Alan—a good friend from Hawai’i—and I purchased the rest of the 300 acres, I gave it back to them . . . At the time, I was teaching with a very famous herbalist, Rosemary Gladstar, who is a well-known, . . remarkable woman . . . and when she came down here, basically her mind was blown. She had not seen this kind of concentration of herbs and trees anywhere. She lived in Vermont. They don’t have the plants there… it’s too cold up there. You don’t have a great growing season . . . So, then she had all these friends from the West—all these incredible herbalists and herb companies—and we invited them all to come down to the farm. There were about fifteen or twenty herbalists, some of them my heroes, some of them whose books I had read before I met them, and I took them to the sanctuary land, and we just started walking. By the time we got about a mile or two, everybody’s mind was just blown. They had never seen what I see every day, and we decided as a group to turn this into the first botanical sanctuary in America dedicated to at-risk botanical plants. And those are the plants in the forest that are worth the most money and are usually ripped off.

    PS

  • Such as ginseng, right?

    AJ

  • Number one on a list is ginseng. Number two is goldenseal. A lot of other people came to help do this work because they too saw this land in the same way I see it. I can look at a tree; I can just feel the energy. It’s really not rocket science.

    PS

  • Sure, but it’s also not easy. We think that it’s easy to be self-sufficient, go off-grid, and grow food, but at some point, you realize that you would have to buy out the entire watershed to protect yourself from pollution from the surrounding land. In a way, that’s what you started doing. You created a community that together can protect enough land and save it from what’s going on around.

    AJ

  • That is very true. The creek that runs by my house, that water emptied from a strip mine a mile away. I knew that strip mine, I used to ride my horses up there. God, it was like the moon with garbage. When I started redoing that strip mine and putting lime down and fertilizing it, the creek had no insects, no mammals, no fish. Within five years, they were all back in the creek.

     

    PS

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Ethnobotany

PP web conversations image_Mark Plotkin Kwamalasamutu Suriname
Mark Plotkin

Taking a sample from a plant used to treat insect stings during a meeting with elders in the village of Kwamalasamutu in southwest Suriname.

Courtesy Amazon Conservation Team.

The lens for this conversation is ethnobotany: the science of plant-human interactions.

I am talking to Dr. Mark Plotkin.

— Aleksandra Jaeschke

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist, who has spent almost three decades studying traditional plant use with the healers of tropical America. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, his master’s degree in forestry from Yale University, and his PhD from Tufts University. As part of his doctoral studies, he worked with the Tiriyó people of Suriname on a handbook detailing their medicinal plants. He did research at Harvard under the father of ethnobotany, Richard Schultes.

Dr. Plotkin is the author of Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice and Medicine Quest: In Search of Nature’s Healing Secrets, and co-author (with Michael Shnayerson) of The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug-Resistant Bacteria. His recent podcast series is entitled Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation.

Dr. Plotkin previously served as Director of Plant Conservation at the World Wildlife Fund and Vice President of Conservation International. In 1996, Plotkin and Costa Rican conservationist Liliana Madrigal formed the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) to protect Amazonian rainforest in partnership with local Indigenous peoples. ACT has now worked with fifty tribes throughout Amazonia.

In 2001, Time called Dr. Plotkin an “Environmental Hero for the Planet.” In 2005, Smithsonian included him among the “35 Who Made a Difference.” In 2008, Plotkin and Madrigal were among the Skoll Foundation’s “Social Entrepreneurs of the Year.” In 2010, Jane Goodall presented Mark Plotkin with an award for “International Conservation Leadership.”

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  • I’d love to hear more about the project that you worked on with the Tiriyó people of Suriname, but also understand why you decided not to publish the results in English and hand it over to them in their native language.

    Aleksandra Jaeschke

  • When I first went to the village . . . they weren’t even using the medicinal plants themselves, all the old shamans were still there but they were forbidden to practice medicine because it was regarded as the devil’s work and the fundamentalist missionaries had taken over the culture. So, I said, “Let me write it down. I’m not going use it, I’m not going sell it.” And one shaman said, “Why would you want do this? It has no value. We don’t even use it ourselves.” And I said, “Look, I’m a Jew, and that Bible you read in church every Sunday, that was written by my ancestors, not the missionary’s ancestors, they are Christians. I want to write this down so your grandchildren can learn from this book just like we learned from what my ancestors wrote down.” Well, the shaman liked that.
    So, I did that for eight years, and then I gave him the book in their language, which was, compared to what they ended up with, like the CliffsNotes: “They use this plant for this.” When I gave it to him, he called a meeting and said, “Now we’re going to flesh this out because if you really want to preserve and protect this, you can’t just write down, “Species A is used for headache and species B is used for menstrual pain.” What part of the plant? How much of the plant? How do you prepare it? What’s the dosage? How do you diagnose the patient? That’s a real medical textbook. And they did it. But once again, I was riding shotgun. I didn’t make the book. I did the outline, but they fleshed it out and that gives them ownership and it also gives them pride because now they have two books in their language, the holy Bible presented by the missionaries, and The Tiriyó Plant Medicine Handbook done by them. That gives them ownership; that gives them pride; that gives them something useful based on their traditions that they were ready to throw away, and it is now saved forever.

    Mark Plotkin

  • How did you gain their trust?

    AJ

  • Well, I’m still working on it.

    MP

  • [chuckle] You’re still working on it?

    AJ

  • . . . Friendships are evolutionary they’re not revolutionary . . . Somebody you meet at a party is not your best friend . . . And so, they’re still showing me new plants, which also means they’re still holding out. The glass is half full and half empty. There is not much they’re holding back from me, but the fact that after thirty-eight years they’re still showing me new stuff, I mean, “Okay, aren’t we pals now?” [laughter]

    MP

  • Was the shaman’s apprenticeship program related to the book? It looks like you gained enough trust among these people to convince them that you can help them train the future generation. But why did they need a Westerner? Isn’t the oral tradition enough?

    AJ

  • Because modernity is pressing in on all sides, and they see white people come in with cell phones, and they see Black people come in with walkie talkies, and they see Chinese people coming in with chainsaws and they think, “Wow, the outside world has all the answers.” Then you have the people who were in charge when I got there who were fundamentalist missionaries telling them, “That’s the devil’s work. Don’t do it. You’ve got the white man’s medicine.” And then here I come in. I’m not a Christian. I’m not telling them what to believe, not to believe, what to wear, what not to wear. I said, “I want to learn from you guys. This is cool stuff. The world is interested in this stuff . . . See that aspirin the missionary gave you? That came from a plant. See the quinine pills the missionary gave you? That came from a plant. Even the missionary doesn’t know that.” So, it’s about creating the breathing space so they don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. The tribe to the west was helping the missionaries ten years before, and all the shamans died. Nobody ever wrote it down. The missionaries got thrown out because of political turmoil, and then they had nothing. They had no Western medicine. They had none of their own medicine. So that was an easy case to point to because they all knew this worst-case scenario is very real.

    MP

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Ecology

PP web conversations image_Stuart Pimm Uniao Brazil
The União reserve in Brazil (on the right)

Isolated from the forest to its west in 2007 and in 2017 after reforestation connected the reserve to the forests (marked in orange).

Map Data: Google, © 2019 Landsat, Copernicus / DigitalGlobe.

The lens for this conversation is ecology: the science of environmental relations.

I am talking to Professor Stuart Pimm.

— Aleksandra Jaeschke

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Stuart Pimm is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University. Dr. Pimm received his bachelor of science degree from Oxford University and his PhD from New Mexico State University. He is a world leader in the study of present-day extinctions and what can be done to prevent them. His research covers the reasons why species become extinct, how fast they do so, the global patterns of habitat loss and species extinction and, importantly, the management consequences of these investigations. His research areas include the Everglades of Florida and tropical forests in South America, especially the Atlantic Forest of Brazil and the northern Andes—two of the world’s hot spots for threatened species. Professor Pimm is the author of over 270 scientific papers and four books, including The Balance of Nature? and The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth. In recognition of his research and conservation efforts, Professor Pimm was awarded the 2019 International Cosmos Prize. His honors also include the 2010 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the 2006 Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences. Pimm is the founder of the non-governmental organization Saving Nature and has been actively involved in habitat preservation since 2010.

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  • You have restored hectares of forest, and I imagine that each time you start, you know what to reconnect. Say you’re standing amid a barren landscape, and you have a relatively undisturbed patch on your left, another one on your right, and you decide to plant a key tree right where you’re standing. But a forest is a complex system, so how do you reassemble the complexity of that habitat? How do you know that what you’re planting will trigger the development of something that resembles what’s growing to your left and to your right? Can you tell us about your earlier work on assembling complexity?

    Aleksandra Jaeschke

  • People who have read my work very carefully often ask that question in a much more aggressive way. I know from all my theoretical work that the order in which we put the pieces back together, the pieces that we try to assemble, is going to make an enormous difference to the final community. Do I worry about that when I plant my trees? Absolutely not. I can’t because I wouldn’t be able to plant a tree if I did. We try to plant forty, fifty, hundreds of species of trees. We are all planting native trees. Do we know what mix to use? No, but we try to provide a diverse mix. We know that quite quickly animals will start moving through the forest and they will feed on fruit, and they will poop those fruit seeds out onto the forest floor… We know that birds will eat the fruit and disperse them. And I think it’s quite possible that one hundred years from now, some smart ecologist will say, “Why the hell did Professor Pimm plant forests like that? That was the wrong thing to do.” But I hope she recognizes that the forest that we planted may not be perfect, but it’s a forest and it’s not a barren cattle pasture.

    Stuart Pimm

  • Of course. What’s fascinating to me is that, in a way, you’re providing this community, the ecosystem, with enough bits and pieces for it to reassemble some form of complexity on its own.

    AJ

  • Absolutely.

    SP

  • Maybe not the one that was there initially as there’s no hope to re-establish the initial order.

    AJ

  • No.

    SP

  • And of course, it is not going to evolve in the same sequence. But what’s fascinating is that we’re recognizing that we shouldn’t be arrogant and think that we can reestablish what was there, but we can still establish something that will allow the species to thrive. Right?

    AJ

  • Exactly so. And my science feeds into that. We know that it’s almost impossible to restore nature to where it was, that people who try to do that almost always fail. But we also do know that if we try to restore nature in lots of different ways—in other words, have different starting conditions, plant a different set of species here, then there, then there— that in total, we’ll get all the pieces back. I’ve done a little bit of work on this in prairies. The one ecosystem we have lost in the United States is prairies. We’re never going to put prairies back exactly the way they were. I’ve done experiments with Wes Jackson at the Land Institute. We said, “Let’s plant a dozen species here and a dozen species there and a dozen species there.” The fact is, after a long period of time, we’ve managed to assemble a lot of species, even if they weren’t exactly the right species in the right place. Probably what that tells us is that there is enormous contingency in nature. The forest outside my window is not predetermined in a very microscopic way. There are many elements of chance. The important thing is that we keep all the pieces. Aldo Leopold famously said the first law of intelligent tinkering is to keep every cog and wheel. And I think that principle works very well. We need to make sure we don’t lose the pieces. As long as we’ve got all the pieces working somewhere, I don’t think we have the luxury of working out whether we’ve got them exactly in the right place.

    SP

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Botany

PP web conversations image_Stefano Mancuso_aerial roots
Aerial Prop Roots

A problem-solving strategy adopted by many Ficus species, as an emblem of plant intelligence.

Photograph by Aleksandra Jaeschke

The lens for this conversation is botany: the science of plant life.

I am talking to Dr. Stefano Mancuso.

— Aleksandra Jaeschke

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Stefano Mancuso is a botanist and professor in the Department of Agriculture, Food, Environment, and Forestry at the University of Florence in Italy. His work focuses on plant intelligence—that is plants’ capacity to sense, communicate, and solve problems. Professor Mancuso is the founder and director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, a steering committee member of the Society of Plant Signaling and Behavior, the editor-in-chief of the Plant Signaling and Behavior journal, and a member of the Florentine Accademia dei Georgofili. Professor Mancuso is the author of The Nation of Plants, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants, The Incredible Journey of Plants, and co-author (with Alessandra Viola) of Brilliant Green. He is the recipient of numerous literary awards.

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  • The diffused, or decentralized organization in plant species is an incredibly successful strategy. After all, plants are the most common form of life; they have clearly been successful. We associate decentralization with resilience and decreased vulnerability, but we hardly ever use plants as an example. We prefer to use the example of the internet. Why don’t we pay more attention to plants as a model?

    Aleksandra Jaeschke

  • It’s a wonderful question: Why are we unable to see plants, in general? It’s strange that we took all our inspiration in building everything—our society, our organizations, our tools—from animals. Even the computer is made like an animal, with a central processor. We are just producing replicas of ourselves. We are unable to see other forms of ability. We are incredibly presumptuous living beings. We feel that we humans are the best living organisms on earth. I think that this is an error, a big error. This has nothing to do with ethics. It’s just a matter of fact.

    Stefano Mancuso

  • A matter of perspective?

    AJ

  • Perspective, right. First, what does it mean to be better? It is a human idea. It means that there is a goal, an objective, and you can measure the efficiency with which you reach that goal or objective. Let me give you an example: if we are playing tennis and I win, it means that I am better than you. It’s easy. There is a goal and there is a way to measure the efficiency, right? But in case of life, what’s the goal? The goal of life has nothing to do with our brains. We feel that we are the best, better than any other organisms, because we were able to paint the Sistine Chapel or because we are able write the…

    SM

  • Symphony No. 5. [chuckle]

    AJ

  • Yes, Symphony No. 5. Because we can come up with, for example, the theory of relativity, we think that we are better. No, this has nothing to do with the main goal of life. The main goal of life is the survival of the species. From this point of view, we are not good at all. We are a very young species; we are just 300,000 years old. Whereas the average life of a species on the planet is five million years. Now, we are just 300,000 years old which means that we should be able to live for another 4,700,000 years to reach the average. And I think that this is, of course, a dream. We wonder if we will be able to survive another 1,000 years, maybe 10,000, and at the moment, it looks like even this will be impossible for us human beings.

    SM

  • The plants will outlive us.

    AJ

  • Yes, the plants are much better than us. It’s true. Let’s say that humans will disappear in 100,000 years. Even thought that sounds like a huge amount of time, our species will have lasted just 400,000 years, nothing. The fact that we were able to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or write the fifth symphony would be completely irrelevant. What’s important is to maintain the species alive. From this point of view, we are the worst of the species, not the best. This is why I think that we need to look at plants.

    SM

  • As a model.

    AJ

  • Yes, as a model, as the model. If we want to survive, we need to imitate plants . . . We are the only species that is able to destroy the environment on which it depends. We are incredibly stupid.

    SM

  • Speaking of disturbing the environment, you mentioned before that plants are equipped with twenty different types of sensing systems, which is four times more than humans have. I wonder whether this hypersensitivity makes them more exposed to human disturbances such as urban noise, air pollution, or vibrations from car traffic.

    AJ

  • Yes, you’re right. In the urban environment, plants are losing the ability to communicate with one another because pollution masks or hided all the chemicals on which they rely for communication. And so, yes, in general, due to their hypersensitivity, plants are extremely affected by human activities. On the other hand, plants are much more resistant to changes in the environment. Look at what happened in Chernobyl . . . within the thirty-kilometer radius around the nuclear plant where humans have been excluded for the last thirty-five years, we see plants of every kind.

    SM

  • An abundance of life.

    AJ

  • An abundance of plants, but not just one type of plant. The region has become one of the richest in biodiversity in Europe. It’s unbelievable. In just thirty-five years, life came back to that region, demonstrating, in a way, that humans are much more dangerous than radiations.

    SM

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Ex-Situ Conservation

PP web conversations image_Kayri Havens Plant Culture
Tissue culture

Used to create clonal replicates of genetically identical plants for experimental or ornamental purposes.

Photo courtesy of Chicago Botanic Garden.

The lens for this conversation is ex-situ conservation that is preservation of endangered species away from their native habitat.

I am talking to Dr. Kayri Havens.

— Aleksandra Jaeschke

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Kayri Havens holds a Bachelor of Science and a master’s degree in Botany from Southern Illinois University and a Ph.D. in Biology from Indiana University. She spent three years as the Conservation Biologist at Missouri Botanical Garden before joining the Chicago Botanic Garden in April 1997. She is currently the Garden’s Senior Director of Ecology and Conservation and Senior Scientist. Her research interests include the effects of climate change on plant species, restoration genetics, pollination networks, ex situ conservation, and invasion biology. She is on the adjunct faculty of Loyola University, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois-Chicago. She chairs the Non-federal Cooperators Committee of the Plant Conservation Alliance, is active in plant conservation advocacy with elected officials, and collaborates with a variety of academic institutions, agencies, and stewardship organizations to help improve conservation efforts for plants and plant communities.

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  • So, would it be correct to say that the plants that spend a lot of time in the botanical gardens or conservatories, lose their genetic diversity and it’s harder and harder to re-insert them in their native habitats?

    Aleksandra Jaeschke

  • Yes. Over time, if you are not consciously crossing individuals in a way to maximize genetic diversity, you’re just letting them reproduce on their own, you will lose genetic diversity. It’s inevitable. And so, if you’re not doing everything you can to maintain that diversity, at some point, you’re going to end up with material that isn’t very useful for re-introduction.

    Kayri Havens

  • So, what are the methods away from the native habitat, in a greenhouse, that allow you to achieve some degree of genetic diversity?

    AJ

  • So, if you’re dealing with living plants and paying close attention to their pedigree and determine scientifically how to cross the most genetically different individuals to maintain diversity. There is a computer program that does that. The zoos developed it, it’s called PMx, for population management. We are in the process of adapting it to plants, which are, as you said, more complex. You have to give it some tweaks to account for all the bizarre mating systems that plants have. The new software, which hopefully will be out next year, will be called PMxceptional, for exceptional plants. And we call plants exceptional when they can’t be seed banked.

    KH

  • So, let me make sure that I got it right. You reproduce plants on the computer? You simulate their crossing?

    AJ

  • Yeah, it’s kind of like Tinder for plants. [laughter] We decide who to cross with whom based on their pedigree. We’ve done this with cabbage on a stick. We put in the pedigrees of all the plants in cultivation, and it told us the optimal match was between a plant on O’ahu and a plant in Switzerland. And so, we asked the people in Switzerland to ship pollen to O’ahu, and they’ve made those crosses now.

    KH

  • So, not only you have to collaborate with conservation groups in native habitats, but there’s actually a network or, let’s say, an online system of information exchange between all the botanical gardens where you all know where the plants come from, and you can tap into that. How is it organized? It sounds incredibly complex.

    AJ

  • It is, and it’s relatively new in the botanic garden community. The zoos have been doing this through what they call stud books. That’s how they track their pedigrees for all the endangered animals. They have a stud book that lists what the animal is where and who it’s related to, and who it’s mated with and where its offspring are. And it’s through that pedigree that they decide that this tiger and that tiger are the optimal cross. We’re just starting to do that for plants, and we’re doing it in species that you can’t seed bank, exceptional species, and species that tend to be really long lived, a lot of woody species. We’re doing it through what are called global conservation consortia, and there’s four of them right now. One for oaks, one for maples, one for rhododendrons, and last, I think is cycads, but I’m not positive on that.

    KH

  • So basically, you are focusing on specific species…

    AJ

  • And then there’s a person, in zoos, they call them stud bookkeepers. We don’t have a term for them yet in the botanic garden. [chuckle] It probably won’t be that. They will keep track of all the members of a particular species that are in botanic gardens all over the world and will help decide who to cross with who. This is not something that happens with every species by any stretch, and it’s not something that should happen for every species. There are a lot of rare species that can be seed banked or can’t… They’re small and you can grow a thousand of them at a particular garden near where they live, and it makes sense to curate them in one place. But for oaks, we can’t grow 1,000 oaks at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and so we have to find out who else has the rare oaks and decide who we’ll cross our plants with.

    KH

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Horticulture

PP web conversations image_Ron Gagliardo Pitcher Plants
Asian Pitcher Plants

Growing in the living wall panels for eventual delivery to The Amazon Spheres.

Photograph by Ron Gagliardo.

The lens for this conversation is horticulture that is the art of plant propagation and cultivation.

I am talking to Ron Gagliardo.

— Aleksandra Jaeschke

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ron Gagliardo holds a degree in botany and chemistry and is a horticulturist. He spent several years working at the Atlanta Botanical Garden where he developed the Garden’s Plant Tissue Culture Lab with the aim of applying micropropagation techniques to conservation and horticulture. Ron was subsequently the first horticulturist at The Spheres, Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. Opened in 2018, the Spheres are three interconnected conservatories that house meeting spaces for up to 800 people and are home to 40,000 plants.

  • Could you talk a bit about the plant procurement, their provenance?

    Aleksandra Jaeschke

  • Oh sure, yeah. Well, we were lucky in that we had a lot of folks outside of the Amazon organization that wanted to support this from a philosophical standpoint. And when I would go to botanical gardens and tell them what I was doing . . . all the doors opened and they said, “Sure, whatever you need.” I basically came in and said, “Look, we have an opportunity here to educate a minimum of about 50,000 Amazon employees in Seattle.” These are smart people who are interested in nature and culture, and some of them someday will be the next generation of philanthropists, the next generation of conservationists, and this is an opportunity to show them a path, and to demonstrate the importance of biodiversity and protecting it. With that, all the botanical gardens said, “Excellent. You want biodiversity, we’ll help you create a collection.” So, we received seeds, cuttings, tissue cultures, whole plants, partial plants from a number of different botanical gardens around the world.

    And when we started looking at our plant procurement… Like, ideal wish list, if you will… Nurseries were not the place to find those plants. That being said, we did get a lot of plants from nurseries . . . the Living Wall needed quite a lot of plants, and some of those plants are more common nursery-type plants. But I think when I left, we were nearing about 4000 individual species in the collection… Individual accessions in our database. So, we operated as a botanical garden. When we went to Atlanta and they shared the plants with us, we brought with us a form with the Atlanta botanical garden accession number, the plant, how many, etc. We brought that in, entered the plant in our collection, entered it in our database, and one of the things that I did speak, again early on…

    There was a lot of discussion early on with our founder . . . We were at the greenhouse one day, and he said, “Ron, where did you get all these plants?” And I said, “Well, these over here came from the University of Washington botany greenhouse”, which was right in our back yard there in Seattle. “These came from the Atlanta botanical garden; these came from a nursery in Homestead, Florida; these came from a garden in Singapore.” And he said, “Wow, this is really cool.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “All these gardens just gave you these plants?”, and I said, “Well Jeff, they understand the mission here . . . They allowed us to take these plants and grow them and display them, because they all tell stories, and I said, ” there’s another aspect to this, and that’s the conservation aspect in that we’re operating as a botanical garden.” It’s not just Amazon with an atrium full of plants; it is a place where we recognize the value of the plants. We are a part of a system that readily shares plants. And I said, “If the University of Washington were to lose a plant from their collection, they’ve got somewhere to go to see if they can get a propagate back and re-establish it in their collection.”

    Ron Gagliardo

  • So, you could become part of the botanical network of exchange? The plants that you planted in the Spheres have a genetic pedigree that is clear enough to be able to send them back to a respectable botanical garden…

    AJ

  • Sure, absolutely.

    RG

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