SOMEONE INFORM ME EXACTLY HOW I MISSED THAT THE BADASS KEW PLANT GOD PUBLISHED A BOOK ABOUT HIS BADASS PLANT ADVENTURES???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
i ordered it bc i have no self control
update: this shipped out today but it’ll take 8-12 days to get here and im dying. carlos magdalena why must u do this to me
okay so i got this book today and spent like 6 hours reading it and im almost done but i really wanna talk about this plant nerd and his many endangered plonts that he loves and protects with all his heart and soul
carlos magdalena, kew botanical horticulturalist, is honestly an unproblematic fave
also btw heres some pics of carlos with the smallest water lily in the world, which he saved from extinction. he talks in the book about how he learned later on that at the time he finally figured out how to propagate this species in cultivation, rats had broken in and killed the only other specimens in the world at the german conservatory they were being kept at, and the habitat where the 1 or 2 wild plants had been living had been destroyed for a concrete company. he had been working with the last seeds in literal existence without knowing it (he had assumed they were still alive) and the other scientists and botanical horticulturalists in germany had been living in grief over having lost this plant to apparent extinction. he originally had 200 seeds recruited for trying to cultivate the species, and by the time he realized how to cultivate it, he had been working with the last 5 seeds in the world. he didn’t know at the time. (x)
reblogging this because I just mentioned this book again! it’s available for purchase everywhere now (as opposed to when I first made this post, when it wasn’t released in the US yet).
OH HEY I’M FRIENDS WITH THE ILLUSTRATOR THAT HELPED WITH THE RESCUE AND DOCUMENTATION OF THAT LILLY:
Lucy T Smith works as an illustrator for the Kew gardens and has been responsible for the widespread documentation of waterlilys, curation of historical research of Lilys, Palms, and many other plants (Kew has a HUGE library of preserves specimens, botanist’s notes from the 1800s and onward, and field illustrations of rare and extinct species from back then, but it’s poory curated and barely organized. She’s trying to fix that) and she helped Carlos by researching the original notes on N. thermarum which ultimately lead to the sucessfull propigation of the species.
She’s really nice and Crazy good at Botanical illustration, here’s her Nepenthes petiolata:
AND HER WEBSITE: http://www.lucytsmith.com/ I really need to get on her case about having a purchaseable section of her site so we can all throw money at her because Kew doesn’t pay her enough.
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