There has been a quiet revolution in the role of botanic gardens over the past 30 years, and one of the people steering it has been a softly spoken Irishman with a will of steel, writes PADDY WOODWORTH
THERE WAS NOT MUCH public fanfare here 18 months ago when Dr Peter Wyse Jackson moved from the directorship of our National Botanic Gardens, in Glasnevin, to the presidency of one of its most prestigious sister organisations, Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis. He took over the post from the legendary botanist and conservationist Peter Raven.
Wyse Jackson often reminds us that the health of plants is our most pressing issue, as it will determine our future on this planet. His style, however, is not to preach but to educate, always to show before he attempts to tell. He is always softly spoken, but he has a steely commitment to his message. For him, the revolution that has occurred in botanic gardens stretches seamlessly from the labels on trees to the gardens’ commitment to a global conservation strategy.
“What always really interested me about plants,” Jackson says, “was the stories connected with them. The intrinsic beauty of a plant goes only so far for me. What fascinates me is who discovered them, how they got their names, and to what uses they are put.
“When I came to Glasnevin in 2005, one of the things I wanted to do was increase the informative signage, to tell the stories of the great plants. Because if you have a tree and you label it Metasequoia glyptostroboides, it means nothing to the average person. “But if you put a sign on it saying that this dawn redwood was thought to have been extinct for 200 million years, and was then discovered as a living fossil in a forest in China, it really comes alive . . . and if you can talk of its uses as well, so much the better.”
Wyse Jackson’s constant emphasis on the uses of plants derives from a passionate obsession with the purposes we have found for them in Ireland. But it has also long extended to a realisation that plant abundance and diversity are not just useful to us but essential for our very existence. It is this urgent sense of the connection between plant life and our lives, and the real and present threats to both, that has driven his remarkable career.
The son of a Church of Ireland bishop, he grew up with a love of birds and plants, nurtured on annual summer holidays in his beloved Kerry. He might well have produced yet another amateur naturalist in a well-trodden – and distinguished – Protestant tradition. But an influential teacher at St Columba’s College in Rathfarnham, Richard McMullan, introduced him to systematic botany through Webb’s definitive Irish Flora, and a professional scientist was born. He became curator of the botanic garden at Trinity College Dublin while studying for his doctorate there.
A field trip to Mauritius brought him into direct contact with the global threat to plant diversity and with its poignant interface with poverty. While he and his colleagues were categorising the flora of an offshore-island nature reserve, needy locals were stripping it for firewood. Many years later, his team’s reports are being used as a baseline to restore that vegetation.
More immediately, when he realised that he could double the population of a critically endangered plant overnight by taking cuttings, he found that his interest in academic research had fused with a new desire to be actively involved in conservation.
“Since then, botanic gardens have “reinvented themselves. How can I put it? They were a little uncertain of what they were there for. They have now shifted their prime focus to conservation, moving from growing exotic collections to conserving plant resources around the world.”
In 2005 Wyse Jackson took up the directorship of our own national gardens. He volunteers that the next five years were marked by “achievements and disappointments. I believe I contributed to a new sense of self-confidence in Glasnevin, nationally and internationally, [showing that] it has a role Ireland needs to be proud of; and to a sense of understanding among Irish people that this is a garden for a purpose, not just a park.”
He is happy that in 2010 Glasnevin hosted the fourth Global Botanic Gardens Congress, where the next phase of plant conservation was debated and advanced.
He is also proud of new projects with a conservation angle: the organic fruit and vegetable garden; long-term projects to develop the exhibits of Ireland’s wild habitats; and grassland restoration plots at the gardens’ undervalued Wicklow satellite, at Kilmacurragh.
But he deeply regrets that financial cutbacks stalled the completion of the glasshouse restorations that had advanced so well before his arrival.
The hoardings that still surround the desert house and fern house, both Victorian structures of international importance, “shout at me every time I see them”.
He has great confidence in his successor, Matthew Jebb, but fears that the continuing financial crisis could put at risk some of the advances already made.
Wyse Jackson was at first reluctant to accept the offer to take over at St Louis from Peter Raven, widely regarded as one of the greatest botanists and conservationists of the last century. But once he fully grasped the extent of the Missouri garden’s international conservation role, he could not resist it. There are, for example, 150 Missouri staff working at 11 key plant sites in Madagascar alone.
Surely he must have felt intimidated by the challenge of taking over from Raven, an affable but formidable octogenarian who continues to have a role at the St Louis garden, as president emeritus, after 30 years in charge.
The steel behind Wyse Jackon’s gentle manner twinkles in his eyes, dancing with mischievous wit. “I’ve worked in botanic gardens for 30 years,” he says. “I have a great relationship with Peter Raven, who continues to be part of the garden. But when people say Peter left me very big shoes to fill, I tell them I have got very big feet.” And in a surprisingly graceful motion for a big man, he swings them up on his desk. His shoes are size 12 at least. As he and Raven share similar agendas, there have been no big shifts in policy since his arrival.
He sees the two biggest challenges for the future as climate change and our burgeoning human population. He does not rule out very painful measures in circumstances he believes will become increasingly extreme. Plants he has loved since childhood, such as the Killarney fern, may have to be translocated to other counties, even other countries, if they are to survive.
And we cannot exclude GM food options, “with whatever safeguards are necessary”, if billions more mouths are to be fed.
“I suspect in future our strategies will have to be based on a large element of pragmatism,” he says. “There will be no ultimate solution for any of these things, just the best possible fix according to what resources we have.”
Missouri Botanical Garden: mobot.org
National Botanic Gardens: botanicgardens.ie
Global Strategy for Plant Conservation: cbd.int/gspc
Leaf through this: Plants and people
Our forbears found many uses for plants that we have forgotten. Plants are part of our social and ecological history, and a part we might have lost entirely, had Peter Wyse Jackson not somehow found time to document the knowledge that lies dormant in our literature, folklore surveys and even Irish-language dictionaries. Ironically, he never found an Irish publisher for this work. But this year, Missouri Botanical Garden, in association with the National Botanic Gardens, will be publishing his labour of love, 300,000 words with 300 illustrations, provisionally entitled Ireland’s Generous Nature: Irish Ethnobotany.
