Why plant stories matter
I got the chance to speak about Legends of the Leaf with American gardening celeb Joe Lamp'l on his podcast this week - you can listen here. It reminded me of how diverse and often unheard the backstories of our houseplants often remain, despite the boom of the last few years.
You can read a million and one 'listicle' pieces on your phone telling you that your plants will rid your house of mould (not true) and that Christian Louboutin's red-soled shoe designs were inspired by Begonia maculata (also not true).
But did you know that the Dieffenbachia (aka leopard lily) was used as a "punishment" for enslaved people - and in WW2 the Nazi regime experimented with its possibilities as a tool for mass sterilisation. The fibres of the snake plant were lauded as the solution to a global crisis in the 1950s, only to be superseded by manmade fibres in the decades that followed, but now people are starting to use Sansevieria fibres again as we learn to reduce our plastic use.
I tell these stories in my book in the hope that people will stop telling me how 'boring' these species are, and take a fresh look at them instead.
Here's a story I didn't have room for in the book: it relates to a creature, not a plant, though. Lord Howe island is a tiny outcrop off the coast of Australia that's home to the Kentia palm: when non-native rats came ashore on a grounded steamship in 1918, they bred and spread to become a major threat to the island's wildlife. That included the seed of the Kentia palm, which they rats loved to eat: all this is in my book, but what I had to leave out was the tale of one of the other species the rats loved to eat: the Lord Howe island phasmid, aka the tree lobster, which is a huge, meaty black stick insect that reaches 15cm long. (Do look at a picture, they are very impressive.)
This species was assumed to have been wiped out by the rats by the 1920s and 30s, but in the 60s a very few specimens were discovered on an even tinier speck of rock 23km off the coast of Lord Howe Island known as Ball's Pyramid. A captive breeding programme began after the insects were spotted again in the early 2000s. A plan to reintroduce the stick insects to the island are now under way, now that a programme of rat eradication has been successful.
If you haven't got a copy of Legends of the Leaf, you can now listen to me reading it - scroll down to find out how.
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