Kolkata :
Hundreds of species of plants that used to exist in India 200 years ago and are now believed extinct are not only alive, but well preserved in the UK. A team of senior botanists from Kolkata, which returned last Friday after a four-month tour to the UK, has found that these plants, samples of which had been carefully collected by the British and kept at the Royal Botanic Garden and the Natural History Museum, UK, are well preserved to this day.
The team has also made a startling find related to climate change: a large number of plants in the two herbaria used to naturally grow at lower altitudes 200 years ago, when they had been collected. Plants that used to grow in Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar have now gone up the slopes to Darjeeling and Sikkim, which the scientists ascribe to global warming.
The astonishing discovery to retrace the journey of these plants was undertaken by the botanists from the Indian Botanic Garden, Shibpur. The scientists were allowed access to all 8,00,000 specimens of Indian plants that had been transported out of the country from the time of William Roxburgh, the first superintendent of the Shibpur garden (1794-1812). His successor, Nathiel Wallich, continued the practice and the lion’s share of the specimens was sent out till 1899.
Roxburgh had tried to set up a herbarium inside the garden in Shibpur, but the plants suffered fungus attacks and couldn’t be preserved. So, he started sending them to the Kew Garden (the Royal Botanic Garden) and British Museum (out of which the Natural History Museum was born in 1881). Roxburgh and his successors, however, got artists to draw the likenesses of each species before sending them out, and these have been preserved as reference points at the Shibpur garden to this day.
“While we blame the British for taking away our treasure trove, the Kohinoor being a case in point, we were both emotional and ecstatic when we saw hundreds of these Indian specimens preserved in the Natural History Museum. But for these, there is no other way of physically knowing these plants,” said Basant Singh, one of the senior botanists in the team. He was accompanied by Gopal Krishna and Dilip Roy. The study happened under the guidance of Sandra Knapp, who heads the life sciences department at the museum and its curator, Rani Prakash.
“This is a ground-breaking project and we are grateful to the department of business, energy and industrial strategy of the UK government for facilitating this. For years, we have just spoken about these endangered plants and this time we got a chance to physically examine them,” said P Singh, director of the Botanical Survey of India.
The research team has also digitised the details of 25,000 specimens and brought those back with them, because rules say that no specimen can be taken out of its country of residence. So, despite the fact that these are specimens of native Indian plants, they cannot physically travel back to India. Some examples can be the Panax pseudoginseng, Picror kurroa or Podophyllum hexandrum of the Eastern and Western Himalayas, which have lost a large number of plants forever. The other two zones are the North-East and the Western Ghats.
“That is not all. We have found that over these 200-odd years, several changes have come about in the sizes of the plants, the shapes of their leaves, their flowering and fruiting patterns, the look and colour of the flowers and fruits,” Singh explained. The mammoth data that the team has collected will now be worked on for specific details of extinction and plant behaviour, he added.
The team has also found out that two of the country’s most unwanted weeds — Lantana and Parthenium, which are exotic in nature — got introduced by British botanists by accident. Lantana got introduced as an ornamental plant, whereas Parthenium was mistakenly introduced along with wheat.
On Tuesday, the additional secretary of the ministry of environment and forests, A K Jain, visited the Shibpur garden and took stock of the initial findings of the team, asking members to draw up a detailed report from the wealth of data that they have collected.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City> Kolkata / by Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey / TNN / March 22nd, 2018