[RwandaLibre] Kew’s 'codebreaker’ mourns his lily

Tom Chivers is the Telegraph's assistant comment editor. He writes

mainly on science. Not a poet - that's the other Tom Chivers. Read

older posts by Tom here.



Kew's 'codebreaker' mourns his lily

By Tom Chivers Science Last updated: January 15th, 2014



18 Comments Comment on this article



Carlos Magdalena, holding the Nymphaea thermarum water lily,

surrounded by its giant relative, Victoria amazonica. (Photo: Getty)



Carlos Magdalena 'has done things no one else can do' but a thief has

put at risk his work to save a tiny, rare plant. Tom Chivers reports



In a little warm puddle in rural Rwanda, a tiny flower used to grow; a

water lily, barely half an inch across. It was discovered in 1985 by

Eberhard Fischer, a German botanist, and it lived only in this one hot

volcanic spring, in a place called Mashyuza.



It had survived there for perhaps millions of years, possibly since

the whole area was a giant lake. But, in 2008, the hot spring where

the wild flower lived was diverted to provide water for a local

laundry. Immediately, an entire species was obliterated.



Or almost obliterated. Fischer had brought a few specimens home with

him, to the botanical garden in Bonn where he worked. He was able to

keep them alive, reasonably happily. But no one was able to work out

how to make them flower, to make them reproduce. The tiny lily

appeared to be doomed.



Fischer and his colleagues tried everything they knew, and asked for

help from around the world. But nothing worked — until 2010, when a

horticulturalist at Kew Gardens, in west London, finally solved a

puzzle that had beaten a generation of fellow botanists, and grew the

"thermal water lily", Nymphaea thermarum, once more. It's still

perilously rare, but a few specimens live. Now, someone has stolen

one.



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The man who resurrected the Nymphaea was Carlos Magdalena, a

Spanish-born plant-grower whose colleagues describe him as a

"codebreaker".



"He has been able to do things that no one else can do," says Richard

Barley, the director of horticulture at Kew. "We have some very

skilful and knowledgeable people here. It is their paid profession,

but it is also usually their passion, so they go the extra mile, they

work out the special way of doing something; they care for the plants

like family members. Carlos is a classic example."



Normally, water lilies are pretty straightforward to grow. They live

in relatively deep water; their seeds sink, eventually, to the bottom

of the lake or pond and grow from there to a few inches below the

surface, sending a leaf all the way to the top.



"But this was a very odd water lily," says Magdalena. "We tried the

normal stuff, but it just wouldn't work. It would germinate, but then

it would get weaker and weaker and die without flowering."



Magdalena and his colleagues tried changing everything: temperatures,

composts, water acidity, nutrients, light levels: "We knew it had to

be something." Eventually, he had a breakthrough: the one thing that

was different about this plant was that it grew in a spring, not a

pond; its water levels dropped and rose, depending on how much water

was coming out.



Unlike most water lilies, it was sometimes exposed to the air — and to

carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide doesn't dissolve as well in water as it

does in air, so growing it in water meant it was starved of the carbon

it needed to grow. "It's quite complex getting carbon dioxide in

water. But then I realised that, if Mohammed doesn't go to the

mountain, the mountain must go to Mohammed. So instead of putting the

carbon dioxide in the water, I exposed the plant to the air.



"So when the plant was two millimetres tall, I put it in one

millimetre of water, so that it keeps really moist, but it still has

contact with the air. And within two or three months, it flowered."



Nymphaea thermarum is small, but it is beautiful. And beautiful, rare

things are covetable. "With any rare objects around the world, be that

plants, animals or art objects or what have you, there are dishonest

people who would seek to have access to and to have the item," Barley

says.



Magdalena is more specific: "There are amateur growers who are totally

obsessed with cultivating these rare plants. They will go to

incredible lengths to get them – pay huge amounts of money, or put

themselves at risk by going to dangerous locations in dodgy countries,

or just steal them. And, of course, there are people who might hire

someone to do it."



On one level, the fact that the thief will probably be knowledgeable

about the plant might be considered a good thing. "The stolen plant

could survive," Magdalena says. "These people will have read the

articles about how to cultivate it: I've written up how to propagate

it, because if I get hit by a train and I'm the only person who knows

how, that's not good. So the thief could provide the right

conditions."



But, in fact, from the species' point of view, that might not be

entirely helpful. "The problem is not really the value of this

specimen as a living individual," Magdalena says. "We have lots –

about 100. Now that we know how to grow it, it's not difficult. It's

more about the value of the plant as a biological resource."



Kew Gardens and other major botanical centres are signed up to an

agreement called the Convention on Biological Diversity.



Nymphaea thermarum, the smallest waterlily in the world. (Photo: PA)



"It's a very cute little plant, and there are many growers who'd love

to have one at home. That means that there will always be a market for

it. If we were going to commercialise this, or make a scientific

discovery, we'd be required to share the proceeds with the country of

origin, and perhaps help with restoring the wild location of the

plant."



A plant thief, though, is unlikely to have signed any international

agreements; they'd be happy to sell it on illegally and deprive

conservationists in the country of origin of money that could go

towards bringing back the plant in the wild.



The Metropolitan Police has appealed for witnesses but it has no

specialist division; the investigation is in the hands of the local

Richmond CID.



In some ways, it is easier to conserve plants than animals, because

you can store their genetic material indefinitely as seeds. "But the

disadvantage plants have, in the conservation battle, is that animals

often have fur and appealing eyes," Barley says. "People sometimes

find plants a little harder to love." That's less the case with

spectacular flowering plants, he says — he sounds almost dismissive of

the attention that "showy" orchids get — but smaller, or less

beautiful, plants struggle to get noticed.



And Magdalena is keen not to focus too hard on Nymphaea thermarum.

"I'm pleased to have solved the problem — if I'd failed, I would have

felt awful — and in a way it's an important plant for me.



"But the problem of conservation is so big, so really it's just one

problem out of 100 million. There's no time for complacency; on

Mauritius alone, in the Indian Ocean, there are 275 species of plants

which are critically endangered. There are about 75 of which there are

fewer than 10 specimens. And there are several of which there is only

one specimen."



Magdalena was instrumental in saving the café marron, Ramosmania

rodriguesii, of which only one known example survived in the wild, on

the Mauritian island of Rodrigues – he successfully managed to induce

it to flower and breed.



Funnily enough, in Rwanda, Nymphaea thermarum has made an attempt to

revive itself. The laundry that killed it closed down after a couple

of years and a local sweet potato farmer diverted some of the water

that had flowed into it to grow his crops.



Even though the lilies were all dead – and there were none in any of

the dozens of other hot springs in the Rift Valley (Fischer had

checked) — some seeds had survived in the mud a few hundred yards

below the original pool and the warm water had allowed them to

germinate.



It's a precarious life, relying on the vagaries of the Rwandan sweet

potato market. But the lily is back in the valley.



More by Tom Chivers



• It's just a storm, not global warming

• When drug companies don't publish trials, people die

• Can we drop the Today programme 'guest editors'?



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