<
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/world/europe/carlos-magdalena-flowers-royal-botanic-gardens-kew.html>
"In Australia, he went plant hunting by helicopter and waded in
crocodile-infested waters to watch a water lily bloom. In Mauritius, he grabbed
a plant specimen off the ledge of a cliff. Last month, while looking for lilies
in a Colombian tributary of the piranha-packed Orinoco River, he jumped from
plank to plank in the pitch dark at 4 a.m. to get to a floating pontoon.
“It’s not that I am that daring,” said Carlos Magdalena, a research
horticulturalist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London. “These
situations just arise, and they are not like Superman extreme. Sometimes it’s
more Peter Sellers than Indiana Jones.”
Mr. Magdalena’s main responsibility at Kew Gardens is tending tropical plants.
But he is also known as “the plant messiah,” as anointed by a Spanish newspaper
in 2010, for his work rescuing several plant species from the brink of
extinction. That work has earned him enormous respect in the field of botany
and made him somewhat of a celebrity in the horticulture world.
His renown only grew when David Attenborough, the British doyen of nature
documentaries, repeated the “plant messiah” tagline at the 2012 premiere of one
of his films, which featured a scene of Mr. Magdalena propagating the pygmy
lily.
The attention, especially from a figure as venerated as Mr. Attenborough,
initially dismayed Mr. Magdalena. “Imagine what happens when the God calls you
the messiah,” he said, standing outside one of the graceful greenhouses at Kew
Gardens.
It is appropriate that Mr. Magdalena’s star moment in the documentary showed
him working with lilies, the plant closest to his heart and the first one he
grew as an 8-year-old on his parents’ finca, a plot of land in the Asturias
region of northern Spain.
The pygmy lily was what helped bring Mr. Magdalena, 51, to broader attention."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-eviction-diversion-philadelphia/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
