A dying breed

摘要

Plant-collecting has long attracted mavericks with a thirst for adventure. In Borneo in the 1960s John Wood, now at Oxford University, had to shave leeches off his legs with a machete. In the 1970s, at the outbreak of Lebanon's civil war, Geoff Hawtin, now a trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, drove a collection of legumes down a mined road to the Syrian border (and back again when he found it was closed). In the 1980s Daniel Debouck, a Belgian bean-collector based in Colombia, narrowly escaped capture by narcos in Mexico and guerrillas in Peru. Botanists think there are up to 80,000 wild species of flowering plant left to discover. But a scarcity of funds hampers efforts to collect them. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992, ratified by 195 states and the European Union, made things more complicated. It recognised plants as part of countries' national heritage and outlawed "biopiracy"-profiting from plants without compensating the countries in which they were found.