Translator: Kathryn Kopple Romine Reviewer: Denise RQ
I like to think of horticulture as a true Renaissance profession,
i.e., one that seamlessly interweaves science and beauty,
but I know what some of you are are thinking,
"Horticulture? That's gardening." And this is gardening, isn't it?
So if you are so inclined,
can I just present a little bit of evidence to the contrary?
Horticulturists get involved in what's known as ex situ plant conservation,
that is collecting seed from wild plants under threat,
bringing them back
and either conserving them in our living collections or banking them
that is chilling them down to minus 20 degrees centigrade
where they can be stored in perpetuity or perhaps until such time
as the plant is no longer under threat and can be reintroduced.
So, with this great burden of responsibility,
it is important that we are ingenious growers of plants.
Indeed, we've worked out ways
to make the stubborn, the reluctant, the hard to grow, straight forward.
Here we have some Hesperoyucca whipplei seedlings
in what we call a growth chamber.
A growth chamber is a most ingenious device.
It precisely manipulates light, heat, and humidity
to create an optimal growing environment.
And while we are briefly dwelling on growing conditions,
let's talk about the stuff they are growing in,
which we might colloquially refer to as compost.
In terms of replicating
the extraordinary variety of wild conditions our plants come from,
this is where horticulturists become as biological alchemists, if you like.
They can replicate any number of conditions,
really by combining nothing more organic matter, loam, and minerals.
The organization I work for has something as niche as a Madagascan humid forest mix.
So, I work at Wakehurst,
a 535-acre botanic garden and estate run by the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew,
who are a global resource for plant and fungal knowledge.
I think Wakehurt is wonderful. I would, wouldn't I?
It's a place of wide, epic vistas and exquisite, intimate spaces,
but like a lot of big, designed landscapes we have a couple of really notable areas
that have reached the end of their natural, designed lives.
Does anyone know that feeling?
We are presented with the most marvelous opportunity
the chance to create something new, and the chance to ask ourselves,
"Right now, what should a botanic garden do when it comes to design?
What should we embody?"
I'll go back to the beginning of the talk;
for me, it's science, and it's beauty.
The science -
Kew's global scientific work is our USP, we need to embody that in what to do.
We need to choose plants that will tell stories,
plants that are under threat in the wild that can tell us a conservation story,
plants that perhaps have a great value
as food, or medicine, or in manufacturing, or for fibers
that can tell an economic story;
or plants that can link us back
to when the world was a very, very different place
that can tell an evolutionary story.
And beauty?
Well, to be vulgar about it, beauty sells, doesn't it?
Beauty is the thing that can enable a garden to transcend its physical space
and pop up in your social media feed or the newspaper you've chosen to read.
Beauty is the thing that might convince someone
with no previously no interest in gardens or science
to come and see us at Wakehurst.
I thought it was worth just having a brief meditation
on beauty and the landscape.
So, if you can please prepare yourself for a short, historical interlude.
So, I did say beauty, didn't I?
For me, mankind's relationship with beauty and the landscape
has swung pendulum-like through the centuries
between two poles: one we might describe as wild, and the other mannered.
This is Bomarzo, in central Italy, created in mid to late 16th century.
It's sometimes known as The Garden of Monsters,
or perhaps, more appropriately, the "Sacro Bosco," the sacred woods.
This was a garden designed for you to feel something,
to have an emotional or perhaps even a spiritual reaction.
But we'll go forward 100 years, to the Netherlands,
and this is the Dutch take on a parterre.
What's happened to the wild here?
It's been reduced down to a single, decorative ribbon.
It's fighting for attention with a series of colored gravels.
But just a few decades later, along comes Capability Brown.
Has anyone heard that name this year?
Capability Brown lets the wild breathe again.
This is the designed landscape as an analogue of nature.
It's soothing, it's bucolic, but actually, for some, it's bland and monotonous.
So, a whole movement rises up against Capability Brown: the Picturesque.
They demand color, texture, and variety in their landscapes.
There's even briefly a militant faction, the Sublime.
They want their landscapes to be ever so slightly terrifying.
This is Hawkstone in Shropshire,
one of the few surviving Sublime landscapes in the country,
and even now, it is a distinctly edgy experience.
When I took my children, I clung to them tightly throughout.
Beginning of the 20th century now -
this is Hestercombe, in Somerset,
created by the dynamic design duo Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens.
Lutyens is the architect.
He lays out crisp lines of stone and water,
within which Jekyll's planting can be ever so slightly wild.
To the modern day, we call this the naturalistic movement
that actually has many different expressions,
but primarily, it is plants performing their fundamental, ecological function,
albeit under the auspices of an aesthetically-driven design.
Now this is Piet Oudolf 's High Line in New York; much talked about.
So, beauty is this thing that creates
what I could pretentiously call an emotional transaction
between myself, the garden curator, and you, the garden visitor,
and perhaps, in the heart of that transaction,
you may be more inclined
for me to share a fact or two about Kew's scientific work with you.
If I've really got you hooked,
perhaps you start supporting the cause that I work for.
So, back to Wakehurst -
two really significant landscapes in need of complete renewal:
a southern hemisphere landscape and an Asian landscape.
How can we embody science and beauty into those two areas?
For the southern hemisphere: what about Gondwana?
That great southern land mass
that, as it split into its constituent continents not that long ago,
it tore whole plant families apart,
plant families that are still now growing on opposite sides of the world.
So, Wakehurst has a long history of Gondwana.
In fact, back in the 1920s and 1930s, our plant hunters brought back plants
from Chile and Tasmania and found that they thrived in our soil,
and that had a complimentary aesthetic.
So our southern hemisphere proposal
is a concept that reunites Gondwana
in all of its diversity, variety, but ultimately, coherence.
These are plants
with a fundamental genetic memory of growing side by side.
And what about the beauty? Where does that come in?
Let's take a South African bulb meadow, which is the proposed centerpiece.
Bulb meadows happen in the wild, in South Africa,
primarily after bush fires.
As the final cinders fade away from burnt scrub,
a vast subterranean community of geophytes
- that's bulbs, corms, and tubers -
leap forth colonizing the new spaces being provided for them.
It's a very dynamic moment,
and imagine that aesthetic translated back into a designed landscape.
Hundreds of square meters of naturalized bulbs,
things like Watsonias or Agapanthus, or Kniphofia, the Red Hot Poker plant.
Think of the marketing potential,
"Come and see our Red Hot Poker meadow before it fades away."
So, on to Asia.
When we were developing the concepts for Asia,
one strong thing kept emerging, that of the Silk Road.
The Silk Road is an anthropological concept but also a botanical concept,
the Silk Road that acted as a conduit for plants of extraordinary economic value:
tea, apples, rice, and ginger.
But, also the Silk Road as a host
for the most amazing, botanically interesting but beautiful plants.
So our Silk Road concept connects visitors
back to the wild relatives of plants of immense economic value
and that forms a backdrop for the centerpiece:
a Silk Road steppe, a vast, immersive flowering landscape
filled with the most extraordinary plants
from the Caucuses
through central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan,
and into the west of China.
Tulips, iris, alliums, geraniums, salvias, all naturalized, all performing
that fundamental ecological function which they remember from the wild.
And one final plant, Eremurus, the foxtail lily.
This is a mountainside of foxtail lilies,
and this was photographed in Kyrgyzstan this summer.
Kyrgyzstan is a country with an amazing botanical tale to tell.
It has more species of plants than the whole of Europe put together.
It is one we want to tell at Wakehurst.
So, next summer,
Wakehurst horticulturalists will be out in Kyrgyzstan
collecting seed from mountainsides like this
and raising the plants back in our nursery
to create a new Asian landscape,
one, that I hope, will embody both science and beauty,
and one, that I hope, will win your hearts and minds.
Thank you for listening.
(Applause)