The Garden in China

It is often said in China that a garden is not planted, but built. The Margaret Grigg Nanjing Friendship Garden was constructed in 1996 at the Missouri Botanical Garden. It is a living, growing symbol of the garden's long-standing horticultural, scientific and cultural connection to the plants and people of China. Among the plantings seen here are many species that are native to China. China is home to the largest and the most diverse temperate flora in the world. But these peaceful environs and lush plantings offer only a glimpse of the garden's relationship with China. It is a collaboration as deeply rooted and diverse as the flora of China itself. I think the Missouri Botanical Garden has the biggest presence in China among different institutions. China is the so-called mother of modern gardens. So many horticultural plants are originally from China. China has a long history of collectors visiting China for that wonderfully rich 35,000 species in the flora. There have been some amazing visits to China and collections of the Chinese flora for horticulture here in the United States and in Europe as well. The Chinese flora is really the underpinning of horticulture and the plants we use in horticulture. There is a history to Western plant research of colonial expansion and information gathering. There's this extractive pursuit where you're taking things away, whether it's physical specimens or information itself. Our work in China has always been very collaborative, at least in my experience. It's not difficult to get specimens out of the country and add them to our collections here. We leave duplicates at the herbaria in China. So basically we're both made stronger by the research. And that's certainly also how Flora of China came together, too. It's a really intensely collaborative effort. Wu Ching-Yi, who was the dean of Chinese botanists, and Yu Te-Tsuan, who was the leader of the group at Beijing, at the Botanical Institute in Beijing, proposed that we should try to talk about or think about revising the flora of China so that all the experiences and data that the people had missed, in that the Chinese botanists had missed while writing their monumental flora of the People's Republic of China, and all Chinese work in 120 volumes, the authentic specimens, the illustrations, and the literature references could be brought into play and the Chinese could resume contact with their foreign colleagues. Chinese taxonomy and systematics is still an area that tended in the past that everybody had their own idea of how systematics should be. And they have little fiefdoms of systematists, of taxonomists in China. And the flora of China really tried hard to bring those different points of view together and to find compromises and to set a baseline from which we could work. Being able to have the flora done paves the way for economic botany projects and conservation projects. There's always been a focus in China, and I think it remains, on plants of utilitarian value, endangered plants, endemic plants, and useful plants, essentially those three categories. And that's something we can certainly get behind. Since 2000, I've developed two main foci of research. One in ethnobotany. I'm an ethnobotanist. I study plants that people use. And of course, China has a wealth of information on useful plants. And then the other emphasis is on climate change. Around 2000, we became increasingly interested in the warming climate. The International Panel on Climate Change had pointed out that the Himalayas, aside from the Arctic, the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau were the two places that were expected to change warm the fastest. We actually have a 1500 kilometer transect across the Himalayas, not only in China and Tibet, but also in Bhutan and Nepal, across the Himalayas. So these are permanent plots in very out-of-the-way areas that we go back and revisit every seven years. So we just finished on three of these plots, our first resurveys. So going back and seeing how the plants have changed after one seven-year period. And we're looking forward to remonitoring some of the others. And then in another seven years, we'll go back to those first three and resurvey them again. And hopefully this will be a permanent ongoing project, something of the scale of climate change itself. So we get to actually see how it's happening. And we set up one of the first national parks in China. I worked with the Nature Conservancy, and they took Chinese government officials to Yellowstone in the U.S. to convince them that national parks were a good idea. Conservation was always a concern of ours in China. Gradually built up as conditions became more and more favorable. And in conservation, the prospects for the future look very good, with Botanic Gardens Conservation International and other institutions pushing conservation in China and helping them to organize their own information and take steps to conserve their plants. I think that in both conservation and in ethnobotany, certainly China can play a major role in the world in developing new areas to conserve, how to conserve species, as well as new techniques. The collaboration continues. We still have a lot of work to do, even though the basic floral work is finished. We still have many groups of plants that are not well understood. So we continue to collaborate with Chinese botanists. In the past few years, people still come here to the garden to do taxonomic revision of different groups of plants. So there's still a lot of work to do. Now we are involved with floral online, water floral online. So we try to get all the information we know online to publish. Very few people in China know plants. So the so-called taxonomies in China are endangered, like in many other places in the world. So we want to close the collaboration with China to train students, scholars in China, to help people know the native plants. Exchanges are really useful tools to be able to train and understand different challenges, both in China and the U.S., if we can exchange staff members. We've done so recently on several occasions with several different Chinese botanic gardens, exchanging staff in the horticulture division to be able to give them the opportunity to experience both the collections management and collaboration, how we do general horticultural practices here at the garden, and vice versa would be the case as well if we send staff up to work in the Chinese botanic gardens. It's such a botanically valuable, it's an enormous component of the world's botanical diversity. So as a global garden with an interest in world botanical diversity, we couldn't help but have a lot of projects going forward that will work with them. So I don't know what the next thing is going to be, but I hope and imagine that we'll continue to have that strong collaboration. So the future in China is really unlimited, and it's only our time and application that decide how much we can do. As our planet continues to change, protecting our environment throughout the world has become our priority. The ongoing collaboration between the garden and the botanical institutions of China has never been as important as it is today. A flora as vast and diverse as that of China is critical to sustaining life, not just across that nation, but around the world too. And we're honored to play a pivotal role in its preservation. My name is Peter Wise Jackson. I'm president of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Thank you for being a part of this effort through your support of the garden. Thank you.