Plant Exploration - A Personal Perspective

Plant Exploration - A Personal Perspective
by Tony Avent, Plant Delights Nursery @ Juniper Level Botanic Garden 4/1/2002

So, why do we do plant exploration and what's a plant exploration log? Well, sit back, get comfortable, and I'll try and make a short story long. When we began to formulate ideas on which to base our nursery and gardens, we were faced with choosing a niche in which to specialize. Having grown up in the southeast US (Piedmont region of North Carolina), I had spent many hours tromping through the local woods. From an early age, I remember rescuing wildflowers just ahead of the bulldozers, while always looking for and selecting unique forms of wildflowers. I would bring these back to plant in my family garden and observe the clonal differences. Even at a young age, I was amazed by the diversity that existed within a single species. I could not understand why commercial nurseries didn't seem interested in making similar selections and then offering these plants for sale.
When I attended NC State University to study horticulture, most of the students and professors there were focused on the common plants that were already found in the trade instead of looking at introducing new plants to the market. The notable exception was the late Dr. JC Raulston, who was hired at NC State during my days as a student. JC was the motivation that I and several other students needed to realize that our ideas indeed had merit.
Across the parking lot from the Horticulture Department was the Botany Department. Botany was where all of the real plant nerds studied...with a couple of noted exceptions. The botany students and professors knew where all of the cool plants were located, but their only interest was to collect dried samples and press them between paper, then file them away in a herbarium (plant mortuary). One visit to the botany greenhouses confirmed that these folks knew little about actually growing plants in cultivation, although they could recite the native habitat from memory. I can remember thinking over and over, what a great boon it would be to gardeners around the world if we could somehow manage to bridge the chasm between botany and horticulture. Indeed, many years later, this would become the foundation on which Plant Delights Nursery and Juniper Level Botanic Gardens would be built.
After a few years in the nursery business, we noticed that when a particular species was in cultivation, it was usually only represented by one or two clones, or a seed strain from one particular region. This would be akin to looking at an American Indian and assuming that the entire species Homo sapiens would look exactly the same. We struck on the idea to make part of our mission to undertake plant explorations to discover not only new species with good garden merit, but also different and improved collections of species that were already known and cultivated.
Our formal documented collections program began in 1994 with an expedition to Northern Mexico. Some of our trips are taken alone, while most are joint expeditions with other botanic gardens or nurseries who share our same interests and collection philosophies. We carefully document all collections as to habitat and location. Where road signs are not adequate, we use Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for documentation. Our collection policies are that we take primarily seed or cuttings. If this is not a viable option, we take divisions of a plant, or in the case of a large enough population, we might dig 1-3 actual plants. In the cases of a very unique individual variant, we may dig a small clump. These unique variants are usually selected against in the wild by the forces of nature, as they have strayed too far from the normal species variation. In making any collection, we are careful not to disrupt the dynamics of the natural population. In a rare case, where construction is eminent, we have taken up to a dozen individual plants. In reality, we probably should try and rescue more plants where the destruction of the entire population is eminent.
Plants from our collections are not sold. The plants from our collecting trips are grown out and evaluated here at Juniper Level Botanic Garden. Once we understand the plant and can determine its garden and potential commercial value (if any) and lack of aggressive weedy tendencies, the plant will be propagated for commercial offering. Of course, not every plant will ever grace the pages of the Plant Delights catalog. Some will be cute in the garden and that's about it. Others may be difficult to propagate, and a few may actually not survive. Since we don't propagate woody plants, these will be shared with other nurseries or botanic gardens.
While we will publish our expedition logs, we do not publish our actual collection site notes. These are only made available by special request to researchers and those selected individuals whom we are confident will protect the integrity of the sites that we have visited.
So, how do we determine where to go on collecting expeditions? The answer is simple...study! Herbariums are great places to begin, as most of the good plants have been found and documented by botanists. There is also an amazing amount of information that has been published by botanists about the flora of most regions. Not every country or state has a published flora, but there are many more than you would ever realize. Many of these are out of print, and can only be found through libraries or used book dealers. Also there are monographs published for many plant groups. Monographs are published papers or books where a single genus of plants is exhaustively studied and described. While many monographs are quickly outdated, these are a great place to begin.
In selecting areas to explore, we match soil types, climate, topography, and many other factors. How many plants are we currently growing from that region and how do they perform? How much exploration has been done before and from where? If an English plant explorer went to China and then returned the plants to the UK, any plant that needed warm summers would probably languish or die. There would be great benefit to be obtained by re-visiting such an area. Often plants growing in sub-tropical climates were actually pushed there by glacial activity, and may still retain quite a bit of latent hardiness. As you can see, there are a number of factors involved in selecting a site to explore.
For many years, plant exploration from the US was limited to a few botanic gardens in the North and Midwest regions of the country. These gardens visited an array of foreign countries, and while they brought back many interesting plants, their distribution systems and policies were usually poor at best. Few individuals or botanic gardens outside of a tightly held network were able to acquire these plants. Many of the older more revered botanic gardens had little desire or interest in sharing their collections. This stemmed from both an attitude of superiority, combined with a non-profit status lack of motivation. These gardens, referred to by the late Dr. JC Raulston as the Zone 5 Mafia, justified keeping the collections where they could be watched an studied by their experts.
The international opening of borders has greatly expanded the availability of plants in many countries, long closed to plant exploration by those outside the "good old boy" network. Suddenly plant collectors and botanic gardens who existed "outside the loop" were on a level footing with the "Big Guys". Amazingly, while plant exploration is becoming more popular, there is still only a small handful of horticulturists pursuing plant exploration within the borders of the United States. The diverse flora of China has truly become the "flavor of the month" for plant exploration, despite equally good plants within our own US borders. For this reason, we have made the US our top plant exploration priority. Of our 25 trips between 1994 and 2002, 20 of those were in the US.