Plant Exploration for Longwood Gardens
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Longwood Gardens, in Kennet Square, Pennsylvania started out as a private garden for Herbert and George Pierce who started to develop the family holdings into Pierce Park in 1798. In 1906 it was acquired from the family by Pierre DuPont of the DuPont family as his private estate. After Mr. DuPont’s death in 1954, Longwood Gardens become one of the leading horticultural and botanical institutions around the world which engage in collecting, systematizing, and growing plants, with special emphasis on rare, unusual, and endangered plants.
Since the ‘50’s, some fifty expeditions to some fifty countries have provided plant material to Longwood Gardens. Personnel from Longwood have taken part in some of these expeditions; the author has himself been on seven of them. Longwood Gardens has conservatories, breeding programs, is engaged in plant trials and new plant introductions, and has large public display gardens. It currently has over 11,000 different types of plants on 1050 acres.
The plants are the stars in this book. None of the plant collectors, even though there are some well known names in this book, are mentioned in the index; only the plants. Each major geographical area of the world, with the exception of North America and Antarctica, has been visited. Each region has its own chapter, with many places within each region receiving attention. The expedition descriptions are often in the words of the explorers themselves.
In the last 50 years, few explorers go out on collecting trips on their own. More commonly an institution joins with others to send out plant hunters with specific collecting aims.
In Plant Exploration forLongwood Gardens, Mr. Aniśko presents an early expedition to each part of the world. Then he treats us to one or more instances of more recent expeditions to the same area. This approach offers a fascinating comparison to how both plant hunting and botanical institutions have changed over time. The world is becoming more crowded; truly native plants are to be found in fewer places in the wild as human activities encroach. Hooker, Wilson, Forrest, and Rock might have been able to go into the Himalayas to find never-before collected rhododendrons and other plants.
The plant hunters that Longwood sent out fifty years ago could still find wild populations there, in China, Korea, Japan and other places. Now most expeditions have a definite goal in mind when they go on an expedition. More and more (but not all) collecting is now done in private nurseries, botanical gardens, monasteries, and other places where the local plantsmen have been gathering and growing a locale’s unique botany
Thomasz Aniśko has included stories of both of these types of expeditions, along with innumerable photographs of unusual plants, their localities, and the people who work at collecting them.
This is not a narrative of the difficulties of plant hunting, though there are plenty of situations mentioned that could be expanded to show those difficulties. It is not a description on the difficulties of taking a plant from one part of the world and making it survive and grow in another. Nor is it a glorification of any particular plant hunter or botanical establishment. All of these themes are present. Rather, we see here the beauty of the flowering plants of the world in all their diversity.
Thomasz Aniśko‘s duties as the curator of plants at Longwood Gardens, include coordinating plant trials and plant distribution programs at the Garden, organizing plant collecting expeditions, and the proper identification of the plants in the collection. He received his Masters in Horticulture at the August Cieszkowski Agricultural University in Poland and his Doctorate in Horticulture at the University of Georgia. He has also studied at the Royal Horticultural Society‘s Wisley Gardens.