Plant Collecting in North East
India
Steve Hootman Nov. 2004
Steve is the Co-Executive
Director and Curator of the Rhododendron Species Foundation of Federal Way,
Washington. He has visited our chapter
in the past, and one of our members considers him a superb taxonomist, having
witnessed his brilliance in instantly identifying all the plants in Evelyn
Weesjes’s garden.
Don Whittle belongs. We all know
him
Every
time we have a Plant Hunting Expedition presentation I see some slides which
put geography into sudden moments of revelation. One of those in Steve Hootman's fine talk on Nagaland and
the Arunachal Pradesh was the slide of the edge of the world. It was the sheer drop of the Himalayas to
the flat sad country of Bangladesh, which is so constantly flooded. One can understand why with the monsoonal
rainfall so well described by Steve, (when sleeping right next to Ken Cox under a chicken coop, he was not able to hear him
speak due to the volume of the rain) which rushes down from the dizzying ledge
of the mountains into the flood plains below where conditions are further
exacerbated by tidal waters.
We saw pictures of great beauty and misery: monsoonal skies, great mists hiding
the mountains, bright red and black shawls of the Naga people, blue delphinium-like
orchids, blue gentian carpeted mountainsides, all contrasted with the poverty
of the Mishmi people who have lost their way of life. Leeches, gun toting drunken militia, slippery almost inpenetrable steep
paths with toeholds cut into rock and bamboo suspension bridges which
would not get the BCAA seal of approval.
I tend to think of the great plantsman in the past tense, but conditions have
not changed so much in a hundred years in these two regions where Steve
and the Coxes explore for new material and seeds for greater diversity of the
already discovered plant material such as R. macabeanum recorded
at 12,600 feet compared to those found at 9,000 feet earlier. These are alpine rhododendrons that will
give vigour to our garden variety of the great yellow big leaf rhododendron so
proudly grown in many gardens.
Some
interesting new finds are in the Vaccinium, Agapetes, Gaultheria and Hypericum
genus. I like the idea of a weeping Hypericum for hanging baskets, a new
low creeping blueberry and the exotic Agapetes serpens with its red
lanterns.
Many of the rhododendrons Steve showed are some garden favourites in the
northern hemisphere with some newer finds such as R. flinckii with
its beautiful indumentum and R. kesangiae spilling over into the Arunachal
Pradesh from Bhutan which claims it as their own. The tender epiphytic R. camelliflorum, R. megeratum , R.
edgeworthii hanging from the trees and the newly sprouting R.
hodgsonii from the clear cutting of old growth rhododendron trunks for firewood
is heartening, for the former are safer from indiscriminate collecting as has
befallen the orchid genus, and the latter will grow vigorously with increased
sunlight.
With the three talks we have had on plant exploring I am glad there are
adventurers who put their own lives at risk so that we may benefit, both from
their seeds, the plant offerings from the Rhododendron Species Foundation and
for their informative presentations in the comfort of the Garth Homer Center
hall!
In
his ‘5 Minute’ presentation, Don Whittle spoke of the Species Study
Days, an annual program led by Steve Hootman at the Rhododendron Species
Foundation in Federal Way, WA. His
topic was the ‘keying’ exercise, which teaches would-be taxonomists to identify
their favourite unknowns. Don very
kindly provided his notes of this fascinating activity, as follows:
The keying exercise was something that was absolutely new to me. To my surprise it turns out that given a flower truss with attached leaves and a crib sheet (actually a series of publications from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh) one can (at least in theory) identify each individual Rhododendron species. One simply has to answer a question related to the plant sample and depending on the answer to this question one is directed to the appropriate next question. For example the first and most defining question is does the plant have scales? Depending on the answer to that question one goes to the appropriate Edinburgh publication. It sounds very simple but complications soon arise. The first is the terminology. There are all sorts of terms used that one has to know the meaning of before it’s possible to proceed. Some examples of terms that many of you will recognize but that I certainly didn’t are:
Glabrous
Tomentose
Setulose
Setose
Rhachis
Bistrate indumentum
Floccose indumentum
Stellate
Etc, etc
The next problem is a little subtler. For example one starts off with a nice truss with medium sized leaves and ends up identifying it as Rhododendron macabeanum. Clearly there is a problem. At this point the required action is to yell “Steve”. “Help”. Steve comes over and asks how many lobes did you find on the corolla. You say “six”. Steve says “no, five”. You say “six”. Steve says “no, five”. You say “But Steve it clearly has six.” Steve says, “I know, but it is supposed to have five.” With this new insight you proceed and find that you have a truss of taliense. When we asked Steve about the plant characteristics problem, he told us that we really needed a whole plant or more and not just one truss to be sure of the characteristics. “Besides,” he would say, “if you are identifying a small leaf species as macabeanum you know you have a problem.”