No queue at Kew

A few weeks ago, one typical British summer day (wet and warm), my friend and I spent the day at Kew Gardens. My last visit there was around 1969 or 1970. I remember going on a school trip from Queenswell School in Barnet, with our teacher Mr Smith asking for “22 tuppences please” from the Conductor.  Though we had to queue to get in back then, thanks to my friend booking in advance, we didn't have to in 2016.

The Hive

We enjoyed wandering round the garden and saw the Hive, an impressive art installation mimicking nature in design, and powered by the energy of the bees. The Great Palm House is exactly as I remember it, and the borders full of flowers beautiful and fragrant.  I remember very clearly bringing home a postcard of a Bottlebrush flower for my mother, and her delight as it was a flower she'd known as a child in South Africa.

I didn't see any flowering bottle brush this time, but I was particularly happy to see the ‘Heritage Trees’ – those mighty personalities that have stood witness to hundreds of years of history.  I enjoyed ‘meeting’ the Weeping Beech and Turner’s Oak.  Going into Palm house, I looked at a lot of the plants with an different eye, because thanks to the last two years of my job, I have a greater understanding of their importance as medicines.

Plants provide so much medicine for humanity – both in their natural state and as the basis for pharmacological medicines too.  I’ve learned a lot about how wild plants provide a natural pharmacopeia for millions of people who have no access to modern medicine, and how many rely on wild plant harvesting for their livelihoods as well. 

Here’s a few that I saw at Kew, with a little bit about some of their amazing properties:

The barrel cactus is used generally as a food and a medicine.
I first saw them this size in Arizona at the beautiful
Desert Botanic Garden.  (I learned a lot about cacti in Arizona!)

Magnolia - the bark and the centre of the flowers are used
extensively for cough and other medicines.
It's well used in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

The beautiful, tall and elegant Corsican pine is
used to make turpentine – all resin from pine trees is
antiseptic (hence it’s a typical ‘flavour’ in household cleaners). 
It’s also used to treat kidney and bladder complaints
as well as being useful for skin treatments.

Ayurveda, the traditional Hindu system of medicine,
uses lots of exotic and unusual wild plants.
It also uses black pepper.  The heating properties of
black pepper help digestion and is also a stimulant.
It tastes good too!

Beehive Ginger – what a descriptive name!
The major compound found in this unusual plant has
been found to be an effective cell growth
inhibitor in specific colon carcinoma cells.  

The plane tree – one you will see commonly in
London as (by shedding its bark) it can survive the polluted air! 
Its leaves can be used for sore eyes or made into a
cream for healing wounds.  It’s also handy for
treating dysentery and diarrhoea.

Liked this? Try these:

An overheard conversation
A day at the Botanic Garden 
Plants - a prickly issue for conservation
Kew Gardens
Botanic Gardens Conservation International
TRAFFIC Medicinal and Aromatic plants trade
Wiki - medicinal plants 
Herbcyclopedia
Article in the Guardian on illegal sales of wild plants
 

All photos (C) Carolyn Sheppard

Karsting a spell

Where I work, colleagues from the organizations that share our building give talks on a wide range of interesting conservation topics. A couple of months back I learned about the systems that are used by wildlife rangers to monitor their patrols and increase effectiveness, and this week I learned about how tiny snails and unique lizards are at extreme risk of extinction thanks to cement.

Cement is made from limestone, and limestone occurs naturally both below and above ground. The limestone hills that are the perfect mineral combination for cement – which is demand more now than ever before as housing and other human needs continue to grow – are also amazing habitats for extraordinary specialized species.

The speaker, Tony, told us of his work (which goes back to 1995) in looking at the biodiversity of these limestone hills. What looks like a ‘lump in the landscape’ to us, whether in Malaysia, Myanmar or Merseyside, probably has very distinct and often endemic (not found elsewhere) species.  OK, maybe not so much Merseyside (but check out Avon Gorge!), because in the UK we’ve more or less mined out every possible bit of limestone we can without crumbling into the sea, but in other countries, that have been slower to ‘develop’ their infrastructure, then the demand for limestone is encroaching some of the most amazing landscapes in the world.

Biodiversity examinations of these rocky outcrops, some of which are huge and cover many hectares, whilst some may be small enough to walk around in an hour or so.  The fascinating thing about the larger ones is not only are there amazing species living on the rocks (fauna and flora), the forest and other habitats on the limestone surface, but also the internal world – the caves.  From snails and bats to shrimp, spiders and crabs, many of the creatures that live in the limestone caves are found nowhere else in the world except in their little ‘bioverse’.

And our need for cement is wiping them out. Knowingly.  Some cement companies will do a biodiversity evaluation, and maybe leave a bit of the rock for the wildlife, but others are knowingly making species extinct. Admittedly it may only be a snail, but it will be made extinct nonetheless. And I can’t help feeling that without knowing everything there is to know about a species or habitat before we wipe it out is quite important (see ‘an overheard conversation’ – there are unknown herbs and plants on these rocks that could have tremendous benefit to humanity, but we’ll never know).

We are losing our precious species on this earth at an unsustainable rate. In the ‘Bank of Planet Earth’ humanity is seriously overdrawn, and unless we curb our consumption (or reduce our population dramatically), the bank is going to crash – and there’s no other ‘bank of…’ to bail us out. 

Photo: Limestone Karst hill in China from www.archesuk.com/

Interesting links:

• Bugs of distinction on brink of extinction (Fauna & Flora International)
• Avon Gorge (SSSI in the UK)
• Biodiversity management in cement and aggregates (IUCN)
• Cemex and RSPB in the UK (RSPB)
• Stop limestone mining petition in Australia (Communityrun)

A night on the Brecks

A spiders nest in the lichen at the forest edge

It’s cold, damp, dark. I’m standing at the edge of Thetford forest with a group of people, most of whom I don’t know. We are listening – and after a short while the ‘churr’ of nightjars fills the air.  We are quietly excited. A noctule bat swoops overhead, and the sharp ‘tweep tweep’ of a woodcock alerts us to its passage as it flies across the clearing in front of us.

“Two on the path!”  The whisper goes up, and all binoculars are trained on two long black blobs that we can just about see in the dim light of the moon. They flit upwards, a flash of white indicating that one is male. I’ve seen my first nightjars!

It wasn’t a good view, but it was good enough for me.  Seeing the nightjars was the culmination of an interesting evening on the Brecks – a unique habitat in the East of England.  I was lucky enough to be with a group of conservationists and forestry commission staff who have some interesting challenges. In listening to the discussions about what could be done to conserve some beautiful river habitat, I learned so much about the hands-on side of conservation. One of the discussions was about whether they could re-flood a now dry flood plain; The ideas for how this could be done had to be in context not just of what can happen now, but in consideration of what conditions might be like in 50 years’ time. Sea level changes may affect the water table as our climate changes, but in the shorter term, upcoming housing developments may further reduce the water flow.  There are never any simple fixes such as building a dam or creating a culvert – not if you want long-term, realistic changes whose benefits will last. It will be interesting to see what they decide to do.

A bright moon over the Brecks

Change in human behaviour has a real impact on our wildlife and even in our woodlands. Around the flood plain, for example, were lots of dead poplars. These trees were planted to provide wood for the matchstick industry, but as that disappeared rapidly with the invention of the lighter.  The trees have just been left to die naturally over their long lifetime. So the actions of man many decades previously have left their mark – especially given that Thetford Forest itself is a commercially planted forest.  Even the clearance of land by the nearby holiday park has meant that some endemic plants are actually flourishing in the car park! 

 

Balancing the needs of the commercial and the natural world are always challenging, but in the Brecks they have a unique habitat that has some amazing birds, insects and plants.  Wildlife is in crisis not just in Africa and Asia, but in our own backyards – our woodlands, heath and moorland, and even our back gardens.  I enjoyed my dark and chilly night on the Brecks because I learned so much, as ever, about our amazing natural world.

Useful links:

The Brecks 

Nightjars (BTO)

Forestry Commission at Thetford Forest

Noctule bats (Wiki)

Woodcock (RSPB)

Liked this? Try these (my blog updates):

Adventures in Malaysia

Crayfish - a parable for our times

Photographs (C) Carolyn Sheppard