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 tributary of Colombia’s piranha-packed Orinoco River, he jumped from plank to plank in the pitch dark at 4 am 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.”
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 Magdalena propagating the pygmy lily.
The attention, especially from a figure as venerated as Attenborough, initially dismayed Magdalena. “Imagine what happens when God calls you the messiah,” he said, standing outside one of the graceful greenhouses at Kew Gardens.
It is appropriate that 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 Magdalena, 51, to broader attention.
The smallest water lily in the world, Nymphaea thermarum, its flower about the size of a fingernail, had become one of Kew Gardens’ prized possessions. In 2014, it was stolen from the gardens. The thief was never caught, but Magdalena, who had cared for the tiny plant, made the media rounds, explaining the rarity of the flower, native to Rwanda.
Since then, he has embraced the role of serving as a megaphone for the silent plant kingdom, a showman as exuberant and colorful as some of the tropical flowers he cultivates. “Plants don’t speak. Plants don’t cry. Plants don’t bleed,” he said. “So I’ve decided to speak for them.”
The youngest of five children, Magdalena was an indifferent student, but devoured his parents’ gardening encyclopedia, reading it 12 times by the time he was 8. “I preferred living with the ants,” he said of his childhood.
With few work opportunities in Asturias, where he managed a bar, Magdalena moved to London in 2001. If Britain was different in many ways from home, the two places shared something in common: damp, green landscapes.
At first, he took hospitality jobs. Then, one day in 2002, he visited Kew Gardens, and the trip turned into an origins story as uncommon as some of his cherished plants.
As he peered through the condensation clouding the windows of a tropical nursery, he dreamed that “all those plants could be at my disposal.”
He sent an inquiry email to Kew’s School of Horticulture, and the principal invited him for a visit. The two hit it off, and Magdalena, despite his lack of professional or academic qualifications, landed an unpaid internship. Four months later, he earned a temporary job as assistant propagator inside the nursery of his dreams. “Time to show off,” Magdalena said.
The first plant Magdalena saved from extinction was the café marron, or Ramosmania rodriguesi, a tree that grows to about the height of a man and has distinctive white, star-shaped flowers. Endemic to the Mauritian island of Rodrigues, no living specimen had been seen since 1877 — until a schoolboy found another some 45 years ago.
A cutting was sent to Kew Gardens, and although the clone flowered, the plant did not produce seeds. Until Magdalena arrived. In what has become part of botany lore, he spent five months intensely studying the plant. After much experimentation and 200 attempts at pollination, he succeeded in coaxing forth seeds, around 20 of which were sent to Mauritius, where the pretty flower is now seen once again.
“Carlos delivers,” said Dr Alex Monro, a lead scientist at Kew Gardens. While Magdalena eventually earned a diploma from the Kew horticultural school — to him, “the Oxford of gardening” — he is known for relying less on traditional techniques than for more unconventional approaches.
To help save the pygmy lily, he borrowed seeds from a botanical garden in Germany. While these seeds germinated, they quickly died. “An extinction awaiting to happen,” he said. - The New York Times
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