August 26, 2001

 

PAYING HOMAGE TO AN ELDER AT KEW GARDENS – by Bud Collins

 

LONDON - My mother liked potted plants but not potted people. She thought people would be better off if they drank - like the plants - strictly water. A determined gardener, she would have been pleased to accompany another one, my friend Aurelio, to Kew Gardens and have this pointed out:

 

"Before you is the oldest potted plant in the entire world."

 

   Really?

 

Since my mother wasn't available, I was the one Aurelio hit in the eyes with that startling message. I didn't know if I should genuflect, or what, because Aurelio is serious about botanical matters, and has threatened to drag me to Bhutan in the Himalayas to inspect the towering forests of flowering rhododendrons. But I did realize that I should show some respect for this ferny-looking elder with 7-foot trunk - a cycad - that by latest count is at least 226 years old.

 

Although mother's potted geraniums, and even a barren banana tree (for years we anticipated vainly the appearance of Chiquita-esque fruit), looked better, spryer, to me than this African cycad, they were indeed a lot younger. I knew it was a cycad because Aurelio told me so; she also sprang the Latin name on me: "encephalartos alstensteinii."

 

Conscientious gardeners know their Latin. Self-conscious, but not to be shown up, I responded, "Quid facit agricola?" having waited decades to declaim the only phrase I remembered from ninth-grade Latin. It's a useful phrase, "Quid facit agricola?" - "What is the farmer doing?"

 

"Probably cultivating his cycads," replied Aurelio.

 

Some intrepid 18th-century English explorer named Mason had dug up this cycad in South Africa. Coddlingly, he kept it alive during a long voyage home to London, arriving in 1775. Then he checked it in here at Kew, which had been for 57 years - and remains - a fascinating repository of exotic flora and fauna.

 

Repotted or boxed numerous times, the cycad seems to enjoy the setting, with nothing much more to look forward to than a 300th birthday party in 2075. (Kew would rather you sent a contribution to the general fund rather than cards or bottled water.   Tucked into southwest London, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (to use the straight name), is a wondrous 300-acre blend of the civilized and the wild. English formal gardens and tropical jungles, peaceful groves and rain forests, tangled swamps and a Chinese pagoda are among the ingredients that make the great city at its gates seem very far away.

 

A puzzling layout of many directions and choices, Kew is symbolized, to me anyway, by one of the myriad intriguing trees: a Chilean pine, a.k.a. the Monkey Puzzle. Resembling a green stack of spiky candelabras, it presents a climbing problem to be solved only by a very nimble primate. Solving Kew takes a lot of legwork, and maybe a lifetime.

 

We were in the the tropics, the glass-domed Palm House, one of five conservatories where climate control and shrewd gardening enables vegetation from across the globe to thrive in London. It was hot. Malaysian or Papuan hot. The palms and rubber trees, the stands of bamboo and sugar cane loved it, and flowers hung happily from vines like Rasta braids. A fragrant Malaysian evergreen, the ylang-ylang, belongs to a family whose oils are sought by perfume makers.

 

Though that cycad has made its name through longevity, it isn't the overgrown greenhouse's most prominent sight. In fact it is almost lost in the greenery pushing skyward when, standing on a white iron circular catwalk at the top of the dome, you peer at the jungle from above.

 

It was too hot to stick around for long. Bidding goodbye to the potted 18th-century survivor, we departed, pausing outside for an aromatic sniff at a flaming rose garden before strolling to the Princess of Wales Conservatory.

 

The rain forest within made it feel like plunging into a giant, microwaved salad bowl. A place of several confusing levels, Wales was kind of scary. At one pond, monsters out of control - lily pads called Victoria Amazonica - appeared menacing, and were being defensively pruned by one of their keepers in hip boots.

 

"They grow fast, to 6 feet in diameter within two weeks," he said. He was a brave man, waging an unending battle with clippers so that, I suppose, the lily pads won't envelop and suffocate spectators.

 

Imagine Monet trying to paint them without a security guard at his side? He was better off at Giverny.

 

Frolicking in the pond were nasty little yellow-and-black Mexican poison dart frogs.

 

"They can't get out. Relax," Aurelio said, cooing to them in Spanish, something like, "Make nice, you little sweeties."

 

Down the way were piranhas, but behind glass. I didn't trust the glass, and was out of there.

 

Kew is so vast that, even with a map, I could get lost. And I did. You would need years to take in the entire picture. Except that the picture is constantly changing, embracing seemingly scores of countries within the boundaries.

 

Looking for Aurelio, I searched the rockery, a rugged jumble of sandstone boulders where plants and flowers of six global regions flourish in the gullies and beside the waterfalls, and the adjacent glass pyramid, the Alpine House, where I gaped at strange orchids that looked like purple wieners on sticks.

 

No luck. I thought of turning myself in at lost-and-found, which, I was told, is a busy office, dealing with numerous straying, missing persons, mostly husbands. Kew attracts crowds, but is so roomy that you don't notice them. There is plenty of beautiful privacy and solitude to go around. No path is really beaten. Aurelio, who never gets lost, was out there somewhere.

 

Then I remembered that I had been talking with Aurelio about the amazing Marianne North. "Amazing" may be a tepid adjective for this extraordinary, intrepid Victorian woman, one of the prodigious travelers. More than 100 years ago she began roaming far from their London home with her father, an affluent British MP. Those trips covered Europe and the Middle East.

 

But in 1871, when he died, his 40-year-old daughter continued alone and went farther afield: North and South America, South Africa, Japan, India, Sarawak, Java, Australia. Not only was such journeying arduous, sometimes dangerous, but it simply wasn't done by a woman on her own.

 

Nevertheless, Marianne North did it. Not just as a curious tourist. No, she was on a mission to capture the scenes, to sketch and paint them, particularly the flowers, trees, and plants. How brilliantly she succeeded was revealed when I made my way to the Marianne North Gallery. Of course Aurelio was there, saying, "Miss North is one of my heroines."

 

Two high-ceilinged rooms in the clerestoried building that she gave to Kew in 1879 are a shrine to North, the walls solidly covered with her vivid oils (832 of them). It took her a year just to arrange them as a dazzling display in many colors - blossoms, billowing trees, landscapes.

 

"In your face!" is an expression that she wouldn't have used. But it fits as she bowls you over with her life's work - blooming, thriving, some of it indestructible like her Niagara Falls, or the Atlantic crashing against rocks at Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass. Kangaroos and koalas. The Taj Mahal. Ostriches hatching jumbo eggs. What a cast of flora and fauna.

 

North's splash is an inspired gift. Instead of potting plants she preserved by painting them.