J apanese Knotweed (Reynoutria japonica), also known as Polygonum cuspidatum and Fallopia japonica, is a robust herbaceous perennial belonging to the buckwheat family, Polygonaceae. Native to China, Japan, and Korea, its stems are harvested as a wild-foraged vegetable in various parts of the world, including throughout the United States during spring. In late summer, it blooms with dangling clusters of ivory flowers that emit a delightful scent, attracting honeybees with its prized nectar. This results in honey reminiscent of the richness of buckwheat.

Beyond its culinary uses, Japanese Knotweed boasts a rich history in traditional medicine spanning over two millennia. Recent studies highlight its abundance in the powerful polyphenol resveratrol, an antioxidant renowned for its anti-inflammatory properties. Today, it is utilized in treating ailments such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Lyme disease, an epidemic spread by tick bites that is on the rise in countries around the world. Foraged tender young shoots, tasting akin to rhubarb, are particularly prized for their high concentration of resveratrol and are used in supplements, powders, and tinctures.

Despite its medicinal and culinary merits, Japanese Knotweed poses a significant ecological threat. Classified as one of the world’s worst invasive species by the World Conservation Union, it has established itself in 42 U.S. states, wreaking havoc on native ecosystems. Its rapid growth rate, ability to outcompete indigenous flora, and resilience to eradication efforts make it a formidable adversary.

In places like County Kerry, Ireland, Japanese Knotweed has proliferated, causing urgent problems. Its unchecked spread has disrupted urban and rural landscapes, threatening biodiversity by monopolizing habitat resources and destroying native plants. Despite stringent regulations and costly eradication measures, the presence of Japanese Knotweed persists. This is also the case for upstate New York, where large swaths can be seen in drainage ditches, along trails, creeks, the edges of wooded areas, and the banks of the Hudson River. In instances like these, prevention remains paramount, emphasizing the swift restoration of disturbed areas with native vegetation. Additionally, informed response protocols are essential, delineating strategies for harvesting, management, and, if necessary, eradication by chemical and physical means. An information campaign advocating these measures is crucial for fostering community engagement and compliance with local policies.

Exploring innovative solutions and ways to harness the plant’s attributes could help manage its unchecked spread. Japanese Knotweed has high energy content, making it a perfect feedstock for bioenergy production. Sustainable harvesting practices and robust area management policies may offer a viable path forward. A balanced coexistence with this enigmatic plant could be achieved by integrating ecosystem conservation with resource utilization.

While eradication efforts continue, embracing the ethos of “if you can’t beat them, eat them” presents a novel perspective. Foraging invasive species like Japanese Knotweed and incorporating them into gourmet cuisine is a culinary adventure and promotes environmental stewardship. Luckily, there are now many Knotweed recipes online.

In our pursuit of harmony between nature and society, leveraging ingenuity and resilience to navigate the complexities posed by Japanese Knotweed can turn a challenge into an opportunity for innovation and conservation.

For those who are at their wit’s end, here’s a link to tips on eradicating Japanese Knotweed: https://www.tipsbulletin.com/how-to-get-rid-of-japanese-knotweed/

Check out our recipe for Japanese Knotweed Sorbet!

Gayil Nalls, Ph.D., is the creator of World Sensorium and founder of the World Sensorium/Conservancy.

I’m haunted by a rose whose name I can’t remember. She lived in my aunt’s garden and as a child I was captivated by her beauty. Though I’ve lost the power of her name, I can still conjure an image of her in full bloom, glowing in the sunlight. The memory is potent. When I sit in it, I begin to feel the somatic echo of a trance state. I was completely taken by her. Perhaps I was susceptible to her charms because her vibrant petals of peachy pink, orange, and yellow appealed to my adolescent love for all things rainbow and glitter—my trademark t-shirt featured technicolor kittens playing with butterflies in beds of roses—or perhaps it was something more mysterious.

Around this time I began to develop a friendship with someone in the garden I called Sparkle Rose. She was terribly small and totally invisible. I don’t remember the moment we met. One day she was simply there, flitting in and out of my awareness wherever I went, flouting the laws of space and time, though the garden did seem to be her favorite location. After several years together, our relationship drew to a close, but I don’t remember her ever leaving.

As fantastic as it sounds, my experience with this rose is not extraordinary. The rose is an ancient plant with a long history. Fossil records from North America, Asia, and Europe are rich with roses¹ and humans have maintained relationships with roses for millenia. Reaching back four thousand years, we find them painted into the frescoes of the Minoan Knossos Palace, three thousand years ago they were used to scent fragrant oil in pre-classical Greece,² and two thousand years ago wild roses were grown in the gardens of the imperial palace of the Han Dynasty.³ We have long adored, ritualized, cultivated, hybridized, and monetized roses, our desire for them driving us to disperse them far across the earth.

Roses belong to the genus Rosa, which contains more than 150 species. Today, after centuries of selective breeding, there are upwards of 30,000 cultivars including the resplendent Bourbon, Damask, China, and Tea. Yet most garden roses bear little resemblance to their wild ancestors. Human preference has transformed the five petaled wild rose into the showier many-petaled rose we find at the florist. Though technically, all roses still have only five true petals, the rest are modified stamens who have morphed into petaloids. ⁴ And to trouble things further, roses have prickles, not true thorns.

Considered cooling and astringent, the rose is routinely employed in early medical texts. In his highly influential De Materia Medica, Dioscorides tells us that “dried roses (boiled in wine and strained) are good for headaches, as well as the eyes, ears and gums, and pain of the perineum, intestine, rectum and vulva, applied with a feather or washed with the liquid.” ⁵ In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder echoes this and provides thirty-two remedies derived from the rose. He adds that the rose is very valuable for treating dysentery, which is supported by our modern knowledge that roses, especially the hips, are incredibly rich in the antioxidant vitamin C. Nearly a thousand years later, the Muslim physician and philosopher Ibn-Sina prescribed the rose widely and is credited with first discovering how to use steam distillation to extract essential oils and hydrosol from roses. In the form of rosewater, rose oil, rose vinegar, rose honey, and rose sugar, the rose was added to hundreds of herbal remedies. Hildegard von Bingen encourages adding rose “to potions, unguents, and all medications. If even a little rose is added, they are so much better, because of the good virtues of the rose.” ⁶ She also notes that, “One who is inclined to wrath should take rose and less sage and pulverize them. When wrath is rising in him, he should hold this powder to his nostrils. The sage lessens the wrath, and the rose makes him happy.” ⁷ As a gentle nervine, rose creates a sense of calm and ease. The scent of rose alone lifts me out of my head and brings me down into my heart. And recent scientific research has shown that inhaling Rosa damascena oil has antidepressant effects, increases parasympathetic activity, and even improves sexual dysfunction. ⁸

But well before clinical trials, the ancients knew that love and pleasure were entwined with the rose. The Greeks dedicated the rose to an array of deities including the Graces, the Muses, the Erotes, Dionysus, and above all Aphrodite, the goddess of love, pleasure, beauty, and procreation. From an evocative poem fragment scrawled on a potsherd, Sappho reveals that the sacred grove of Aphrodite/Kypris was filled with roses:

The word κῶμα (kóma), translated in this fragment as ‘sleep’, can also be understood as a deep sleep induced by enchantment or supernatural means. ¹⁰ In essence, the epiphany of Aphrodite is experienced through an altered state of consciousness that drifts down through the rose leaves.

Venus, the Roman counterpart to Aphrodite, was also honored with roses. On the first day of April, her cult statue was ritually cleansed and offered new-sprung roses. ¹¹ Later that month during the Vinalia Urbana, sex workers visited Venus’ temple to pray for her blessings and “give the Mistress myrtle, and the mint she loves, And sheaves of rushes, wound in clustered roses.” ¹² In his book on floral chaplets, Pliny attests that it was a common practice to weave roses into crowns and garlands for sacrifices and celebrations, but that it was illegal to wear a rose chaplet during times of war as they evoked revelry, drinking, and debauchery. ¹³

Much later during the middle ages, despite attempts by the early church to purge the Christian faith of pagan predilections—which of course included the wantonness of wearing rose chaplets—the rose infiltrated the church and became a Marian symbol. Of her many epithets, Mary was variously known as the Rose Without Thorns, the Rose of Sharon, and the Mystical Rose. In Durer’s Feast of the Rosary, she is even shown bestowing crowns of roses upon her worshippers. Indeed our desire for the rose runs deep and the rose is highly adaptable. Skillfully shedding sensual pleasure, the rose in Mary’s garden transcends the corporal in favor of tame ethereal beauty.

But in another garden beyond the confines of the church, the rose retained its sexual symbolism. Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) was an Old French poem about the quest for love that employed the rose as a symbol for female sexuality. Presented as a dream sequence, the poem follows a male lover who seeks entrance to a pleasure garden so that he might pluck and possess a rose. Thwarted by the thorns, the lover receives counsel from an array of allegorical figures, including Venus, on the art of courtly love. It was a controversial and influential medieval bestseller.

Transformation is a common theme with the rose. Especially when blood is involved. In some tales Aphrodite’s blood turns the white rose red, while others connect the rose to Christ’s blood and the spilt blood of Christian martyrs. But my absolute favorite is a Gnostic creation myth linking the rose to the birth of Eros and the blood of the first soul. Eros, born of the first blood, is a primordial being who is desired by the creatures of chaos and dispersed amongst them just as one lamp lights another. Soon the first soul (psyche) loved Eros “and poured her blood upon him and upon the earth. And out of that blood the rose first sprouted up, out of the earth, out of the thorn bush, to be a source of joy for the light that was to appear in the bush. Moreover after this the beautiful, good-smelling flowers sprouted up from the earth, different kinds, from every single virgin of the daughters of Pronoia. And they, when they had become enamored of Eros, poured out their blood upon him and upon the earth. After these, every plant sprouted up from the earth, different kinds, containing the seed of the authorities and their angels.”¹⁴ The alchemical poetry of desire, soul, and love precipitating the rose tickles my inner romantic. It’s a strangely satisfying myth.

But of course, where there is birth, death is wont to follow. Across cultures, the rose has funerary significance, often adorning the body of the deceased, being left as offerings for the dead, and being planted at gravesites. Red roses grew in the Elysium Fields of the Greek underworld and rose oil was used to anoint and protect cadavers.¹⁵ Likewise, the Romans were known to mix their ashes with crimson roses, wine, and fragrant oils. They also observed a festival of roses to commemorate their dead. During Rosalia, graves were tended, roses were left as sacrifices for the deceased, and a meal might be shared. This practice was so significant to Roman deathcare that they provided for the celebration of Rosalia in their wills.¹⁶

The Roman association of roses with the afterlife lived on in Dante, who envisioned the virtuous dead residing in a giant cosmic rose. In Canto XXXI of The Divine Comedy, he describes the realm of divine love as a hierarchical rose that is home to hosts of angels and departed human souls:

1        In fashion then as of a snow-white rose
2        Displayed itself to me the saintly host,
3        Whom Christ in his own blood had made his bride,
4        But the other host, that flying sees and sings
5        The glory of Him who doth enamour it,
6        And the goodness that created it so noble,
7        Even as a swarm of bees, that sinks in flowers
8        One moment, and the next returns again
9        To where its labour is to sweetness turned,
10       Sank into the great flower, that is adorned
11       With leaves so many, and thence reascended
12       To where its love abideth evermore.
13       Their faces had they all of living flame,
14       And wings of gold, and all the rest so white
15       No snow unto that limit doth attain.        
16       From bench to bench, into the flower descending,
17       They carried something of the peace and ardour
18       Which by the fanning of their flanks they won.¹⁷

It naturally follows that roses also relate to the undead. In Romanian folklore, to prevent a vampire from escaping, “the coffin should be bound with trailers of wild roses.”¹⁸ The specification here of a wild rose rather than a garden variety is important. Domesticated roses are lovely, but wild roses are robust. Beautifully feral, they are autonomous and untamed. With their prickly, often dense bowering brambles, wild roses have very healthy boundaries. Encountering a wild rose is a magical experience. Their Venusian energy feels ancient and complex. I always stop to smell roses and if I’m lucky enough to come upon a wild rose in bloom, I tend to only partake in their perfume if a flower is on the edges of the bramble. Otherwise, the rose requires a blood sacrifice and a healthy dose of respect.

With their Venusian vibes, roses are a classic choice for love spells. But I like to work with roses for protection magic. Especially wild roses. And while protecting the heart is certainly fair game, when asked nicely, the rose is happy to assist with most warding, boundary, and protection needs. The disincarnate included: according to Ethnobotanist Enrique Salmón, some indigenous tribes of North America believe wild roses ward off ghosts.¹⁹ However, before working with wild roses, or any plant for that matter, I highly encourage you to go outside and meet them. Sit down, introduce yourself, get acclimated, listen. Use all your senses. But save taste for plants you know are edible! If you have permission from the plant to take a cutting, leave an offering in return. I like to provide water or if I’m in a pinch, my own saliva. The intention here, outside of general politeness and the cultivation of curiosity, is to develop a working relationship that enables you to call upon the rose when needed.

To perform a simple protection spell, find a quiet place where you feel safe and hold in your awareness a very clear understanding of what you are seeking protection from. Recall the specific sensation of the rose and ask them for help. If help is offered, visualize yourself surrounded on all sides by the rose’s brambles, knowing that what you are seeking protection from cannot cross your rose wall. Often, when we feel drawn to protection magic, a part of us is feeling unsafe. Rose is a powerful partner in these instances because of its affinity for the heart. Working with roses for protection is an act of self-love. To close the spell, place your hands over your heart, knowing you are worthy of safety and capable of maintaining healthy boundaries.

Margaux Crump is a gardener and interdisciplinary artist exploring the entanglements between ecology, spirituality, and power. She is currently investigating the phenomena of unseen worlds, from the microscopic to the parallel mythic realms that surround us. Follow her on Instagram @margauxcrump

References 

1. Herman F. Becker, “The Fossil Record of the Genus Rosa,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 90, no. 2 (1963): 99–110. https://doi.org/10.2307/2483008. See also. M. L. DeVore and K. B. Pigg, “A brief review of the fossil history of the family Rosaceae with a focus on the Eocene Okanogan Highlands of eastern Washington State, USA, and British Columbia, Canada,” Plant Systematics and Evolution, 266: 45–57 (2007) https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-007-0540-3 

2. Jennifer Potter, The Rose: A True History, (Great Britain: Atlantic Books, 2010), 8.

3. G. Wang, (2007). “A Study on the History of Chinese Roses From Ancient Works and Images,” Acta Hortic. 751, 347-356

DOI: 10.17660/ActaHortic.2007.751.44

4. Amy Stewart, Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2008), 127.

5. Dioscorides Pedanius, T. A. Osbaldeston, and R. P. A. Wood, De Materia Medica: Being an Herbal with Many Other Medicinal Materials: Written in Greek in the First Century of the Common Era: a New Indexed Version in Modern English (Johannesburg: IBIDIS, 2000), 129.

6. Hildegard von Bingen, Hildegard Von Bingen’s Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing, trans. Priscilla Throop, (Rochester: Healing Arts Press, 1998), 21.

7. Hildegard, Physica, 21.

8. Safieh Mohebitabar, et al. “Therapeutic efficacy of rose oil: A comprehensive review of clinical evidence.” Avicenna journal of phytomedicine vol. 7,3 (2017): 206-213.

9.  Sappho, “Fragment 2”, in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson, (New York: Vintage Books, 2003)

10 Silvia Montiglio, The Spell of Hypnos: Sleep and Sleeplessness in Ancient Greek Literature, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 18.

11. Ovid,”Fasti: Book IV: April 1: Kalends,” Poetry in Translation, trans. A. S. Kline, accessed May 10, 2024, https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/OvidFastiBkFour.php#BkIVApr1.

12. Ovid,”Fasti: Book IV: April 23: The Vinalia,” Poetry in Translation, trans. A. S. Kline, accessed May 10, 2024, https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/OvidFastiBkFour.php#BkIVApr1

13. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, trans. John Bostock and H.T. Riley, (London: Taylor and Francis, 1855) BOOK XXI. An Account of Flowers. And Those Used for Chaplets More Particularly, https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D21#note24.

14. The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990) 178.

15. In Robert Fagle’s translation of The Iliad, Aphrodite anoints Hector’s corpse with oil of roses to protect it from Achilles.

16. Ramsay Macmullen, “Roman Religion: The Best Attested Practice.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 66, no. 1 (2017): 111–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45019253.

17. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1872) 151.

18. Agnes Murgoci, The Vampire in Roumania, Folklore 37, no. 4 (1926): 320–49. doi:10.1080/0015587X.1926.9718370.

19. Enrique Salmón, Iwigara: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science, (Portland: Timber Press, 2020) 211.

American artist Judi Harvest has deep roots in Miami, where she cultivated a profound connection to waterway ecosystems and the diverse creatures that inhabit them, including waterbug insects, also known as aquatic macroinvertebrates. Captivated by these diminutive beings, Harvest not only kept them as pets but to the surprise and wonder of others she trained them to respond to her calls and perform tricks, earning her the esteemed “Smallest Pet” award annually through her early school years, and bringing the intelligence of waterbugs into question.

Later in life, during her time in creating in Venice, a city also intimately intertwined with water, Harvest became acutely aware of the troubling phenomenon of colony collapse disorder and the rapid decline in honeybee populations. Recognizing the crucial role that bees play in pollinating plants and sustaining ecosystems, she became a beekeeper and conceived an ambitious project to establish the Murano Honey Garden in Venice. Despite facing skepticism from others that it could be done, Harvest remained resolute, propelled by her passion for conservation and her conviction in the transformative potential of art and nature.

Creating a garden that attracts and supports bees, thereby contributing to the health of the local ecosystem, is challenging enough in most locations, but the logistical hurdles in Venice are particularly daunting. From bringing in tons of soil, to carefully selecting and locating a diverse array of bee-friendly fruit trees and aromatic plants that would thrive and have prolonged blooming periods in Venice, to sourcing healthy adapted honeybees and constructing their shelters.

In 2013, again to the amazement of many, Judi Harvest opened The Honey Garden, a vibrant and welcoming garden that promotes the welfare of bees and aromatic plants, transforming a forgotten field behind the Giorgio Giuman glass factory, in Murano, Italy into a permanent art installation hosted in the Giuman furnace. 

This April I had the opportunity to visit her at the Honey Garden in Venice and talk with her about her efforts and challenges to create it.

Gayil Nalls: How did you begin? 

Judi Harvest: When I decided to build the Murano Honey Garden on the forgotten field behind the Giorgio Giuman glass factory in Sacca Serenella, Murano, I knew I needed three essential things: fresh soil, pollinator-friendly flowers and plants and of course healthy honeybee colonies!

The first adventure was finding fresh, new soil after I excavated around 12-18 inches of glass-filled soil. The roots of the plants and trees could be compromised otherwise. 

I was told there was a man named Gianni with a boat full of soil, a crane and tractor that passed by occasionally. I waited outside the factory on the water, day after day until one day I saw him and yelled “Gianni viene qui” (come here!)

He pulled over the huge transport boat and looked at the field and told me I needed 6 boatloads of soil. I had no budget, no sponsors and to this day, the Honey Garden is supported by sales of my artworks, donations and Murano Honey sales. I believed 3 boat loads would be enough. Who knew what the boatload of soil exactly was? We don’t have this measuring system in the US. At 6:00 am the next day he phoned me to come see the garden, he was right 3 was not enough. Six boatloads later we were ready to plant the flowers and trees.

After you cleared the ground of this rough site and brought in garden soil, you were prepared for plants.

After the soil, I needed the right plants. There’s no place like Home Depot or a garden center or something like that in the city of Venice or on any of the nearby islands where tourists or locals go. There is an island called Treporti, which is a port, which has a marina, fishing, boats, and lots of greenhouses where they grow things and sell them. Marco Giuman, Giorgio Giuman’s son, the glassmaster I worked with and the family for 36 years now, lives in Treporti. He says when he’s walking to the vaporetto, there’s a greenhouse and garden center place near the vaporetto that he sees, and he would accompany me there. One day after work, they stopped working at 3:45, by 4:15, he was ready to leave the factory. We take the boat that goes to Treporti, from the Faro, which is the lighthouse in Murano.

We walk there, we get the boat. Now it’s about 4:30, 4:45. Rainy again, as I mentioned, a horrible season… just horrible. I was lucky that it rained because we needed the water, but it was tough for me to do this project with the elements that I was facing. Even hail. We get there and it’s now slightly dark, and we walk from the vaporetto, which is about a 20-minute walk straight down the road. We find this place and the guy is wanting to close up, but he lets us in because we called. He didn’t know if we were showing up, I guess. He gives us flashlights and we go through his greenhouses. I had a list because I had spoken with the gardener, Charles Day, at Wave Hill when I had an exhibition there and made friends with Charles and also Roger Repohl, who was the beekeeper there.

The three of us sat down at a table, and he had done some research about the plants that I would need for bees there and gave me the list. I go with this list to Treporti, and I say, “Claudio, this is what I need.” And he chuckles, good luck with that list I thought. He says, “Come on, let’s take the flashlights.” We had on our high-water boots because there was a lot of mud. That’s why he kept saying, “Don’t come today. There’s mud. Don’t come today, there’s mud.” Finally, I just said, “I have the boots. I’m coming. Mud, no mud, I’m out of time.” So, I put on my boots, which I seem to wear a lot there. It’s often wet both in the factory and in the garden. This is a tip for when you visit. If you don’t have boots, you can buy them in Venice and you’ll likely need them. It doesn’t matter the season now, because the water is always rising. Even with MOSE, the Venetian damming project. We live with a constant awareness of Venice’s fragility to climate change.

We find the plants, including rosemary, lavender, jasmine, roses, sage, thyme, wisteria, and more. Claudio puts them on these large trolleys and tells me the next day he is going to bring them. I asked him, “How much do you think they are?” And he says he’ll figure it out. He looked honest. I looked nervous. Didn’t matter. I was in this too deep to turn back. So on the way out, I said, “Wait a second. I want this tree, a pomegranate tree.” It was growing in a large tub. He said, “That’s my tree.” I said. “Listen, the deal’s off, no pomegranate tree, no plants.” He thought about it and said, “This is a 150-year-old pomegranate tree. I said, “Oh, please Claudio, I just can see this in the garden, like welcoming arms and it’s a symbol of prosperity and abundance, I need this tree.”

He said, “Okay.” So the tree had to come in by crane over the walls of the garden and then be dragged to its position. And now I’m in this field that was a dumping ground for glass. I did a little sketch and I thought, more or less, I’m going to try to create this sketch. But when the pomegranate tree came in, it changed everything. It was like one element in a painting. You knew it needed that structure in the center. And it has grown and produces around 40 pomegranates a year. It became a symbol in my work. I make glass pomegranates and I make the seeds. That led to another project, an exhibition called Propagation Bees and Seeds, where I made everything that grows in the garden in glass. Inspired by the installation at Harvard by the Blaschka brothers, who knew that certain flowers would disappear and dried flowers don’t last forever. So they were commissioned to make them in glass actually twice, because with shipping, the first batch were damaged and destroyed when they got through customs at the airport. But the next time they hand-carried them on the plane. I know how that can be. I work in glass because it further symbolizes the fragility of life and the search for beauty in my work. Murano glass has beautiful qualities that involve the minerals from the earth. With the Honey Garden I am giving something back to the earth where my inspiration and art supplies come from. People really enjoy coming there to visit and interact with nature, the honeybees, and the glass masters.

The pomegranate tree is an important symbol for me in the garden. The pomegranates it produces are amazing. They’re huge– the size of grapefruits. I wait and wait and wait for them to become the right color, and by that time I usually have to leave Venice, so everyone in the factory gets to eat and enjoy them.

I’m always hesitant to eat them myself because they look so beautiful on the tree that I leave them. The birds and bees eat them too. The bees, oh my goodness– one day one had cracked open because it was mature, and all these honeybees were inside. That year I was trying to figure out if they made pomegranate honey or not, because we harvest the honey usually in September, end of August, once a year, but couldn’t really tell … We do analyze it to make sure it doesn’t have pesticides. We send a jar to Padua every year to a laboratory, and it’s always passed that process and that’s important. I want my bees and their honey to be pesticide-free. My garden is pesticide-free but I want to make sure they’re not getting exposure from elsewhere.

After planting most of the trees and flowers, what was your next step?

Bees are a keystone species. Of the 20,000 species of bees in the world, only 8 species are honeybees, but they all are facing a lot of challenges to stay alive. 

My next task was to obtain healthy bees to complete the project. However, finding beekeepers willing to part with their native honeybees in Venice wasn’t easy. Despite being given a few names and searching online, my initial attempts were unsuccessful. One beekeeper I met in Jesolo couldn’t sell or provide me with bees because his bees were stressed due to ongoing construction in the lagoon known as MOSE, aimed at preventing Venice from flooding. The vibrations from the construction were disturbing the bees, affecting their rest and foraging patterns.

Feeling disheartened but not giving up, I heard about a beekeeper on the island of Sant  Erasmo named Elio Mavaracchio, who was famous but unlikely to help. Nevertheless, I decided to reach out to him, hoping for a chance. Despite challenges like pouring rain, lots of mud, and uncertainty about finding his place, I persisted and arrived on the island. Eventually, I encountered a car on the road and after asking for directions, I discovered it was Elio himself.

Bumping along, he graciously took me to his hexagon-shaped house, where I was amazed to see a multitude of colored beehives, numbering around 200 or 250. “Are you hungry?  he asked me. I was hungry but it was getting dark and I wanted to talk to him about bees.” Suddenly, I was washing radicchio and he’s making risotto.  I asked to go outside and see the bees. However, Elio kept expressing concerns about the condition of his beehives, noting issues with each one. Despite this, I pleaded for just four hives, offering to pay for them.

After sharing a meal and discussing the idea with his partner Veronica, Elio agreed to set up four beehives. Days later, they carefully transported the beehives by boat to the garden, and our friendship continued. Thus began a remarkable journey, notwithstanding its challenges. These bees have great genetics, so in time, the number of hives multiplied, new queens emerged, and swarms occurred. Despite occasional setbacks, I am thankful for my four-thriving hives. Beekeeping embodies a symbiotic relationship founded on kindness and respect. Luca Polo, a dedicated beekeeper, plays a crucial role with me in maintaining the health of the hives. It’s paramount to honor the bee’s needs and ensure they have ample nutrition. Honey production is essential for the bees’ survival during winter.

Could you discuss your concerns regarding ensuring bees have access to sufficient forage and how you consider their travel range?”

When I built the garden, planting 500 flowering plants and 30 little fruit trees, there was no way to know if that was going to be enough for the bees. Flowers are their only food. They need five million flowers to make a pint of honey and they forage from sunup to sundown. They may visit a thousand flowers a day drawn to them by odor and color patterns. Bees pollinate flowers primarily with sweet scents and they see them in the ultraviolet color spectrum, which humans do not see and are probably more beautiful with patterns that guide them toward the nectar and pollen. Who knows the exact number of plants they visit, but there are some statistics … and they are specific. The flowers need to be easily accessible, such as a sunflower, which is flat. Or a rose, which doesn’t have multiple petals. They don’t like to waste time. They’re not going to go in and dig. They love Magnolias because they can zoom around the interior of the blossom and there is a lot of pollen. But I was concerned, and I worried about whether they would have enough to eat. I certainly didn’t want them to die of starvation.

However, it turns out that in Venice, many gardens are not obvious, because people have created them inside their palazzos or behind walls. There’s a book by Tudy Sammartini called The Secret Gardens of Venice, that shares some of them. She has since passed, but she was famous for her research and photographs of the secret gardens. However, my bees found their closest additional foraging spot in the cemetery. It’s quiet. There are floral plants there and people regularly bring flowers. The most interesting thing is that they take the Vaporetto to get there, which was an amazing discovery for me.  One day, I was riding on the vaporetto as always, outside. I don’t like to be crowded inside with lots of people and tourists and so on. So, I stay outside, right by the gate where the person that opens the vaporetto, lets people in and out from. We arrived at the cemetery, which is the first stop from the island of Venice from the Fondamente Nove. Vaporetto 4.2 stops at the cemetery and then Murano. I’m out there and I look up and I see some bees on the sign CIMITERO (Cemetery) and I’m thinking, wow, those are mine. I’m sure they’re my bees. So I took a picture and the woman who was opening the vaporetto gate said, “Oh, Senora, don’t worry. They don’t do anything. They don’t harm anyone.” I said, “I know, I’m their mother.” I get back on again and the captain of the vaporetto says to me, “And when it rains, they ride inside with me.” I said, “That’s very funny.” So then I think, “Wait, stay outside and watch.” And at the first stop, they don’t get off the vaporetto- they’re still clinging onto the ropes. The second stop is Serenella where I have the garden and keep the bees-and when we arrive, they fly out and fly home.

They don’t swim. It’s one of the few things honeybees don’t do. They get water from nectar and they do drink water, especially in the summer, and they need it for the hive, but they don’t really like water. They don’t like rain. They never go out if it rains. If it starts to rain while they’re out, they’ll seek some kind of refuge, as in with the Vaporetto captain.

At that point, Giorgio Giuman, the glass master I work with, happened to be standing at the vaporetto stop. He is rarely out of the factory, but he had to go somewhere, and he saw 10 or so bees take off. He says, “Giudita, look!” And everybody was amazed. 

At that point, I realized that bees can’t fly long distances over the water and that they may communicate the path to distant flowers which includes taking public transportation. The German paleontologist, Karl von Fritsch discovered the Waggle Dance in 1943, which is the unique dance that honeybees do for their sisters, the other worker bees, in the shape of figure eight to communicate direction, location, distance to foraging sites and new nest site locations.

Bees don’t have ears. Their communication process, or language, is dance. They can communicate up to 40 million messages in one dance. The rhythmic, circling dance is performed inside the hive after one or many bees comes back from foraging. The different scents of the pollen on their furry little bodies also convey information. Honeybees are furry, as opposed to a wasp, which is not, and are the enemies of honeybees. So they do this dance and while they’re dancing and waggling, the scent comes off and they dance in the direction of the latitude-longitude of the sun. At noon, around when I saw them, is when the sun is hitting the flowers that they need in the cemetery at the right angle. They have to be very quick. They only live four weeks, so they have to get in and get out. They don’t have time to waste. Their dance floor is generally the very entrance of the hive. I call it a dance floor. I’m sure it’s technically called something else. Out they go to whatever patch of flowers the scout bee has come to inform them of.

This goes on, sunup to sundown, three miles out, three miles back every day. They don’t forage only in their garden. I see them, they’re hanging out there, but they also pollinate elsewhere. In the mornings, like an airplane, they’re up and out at sunrise. Up they go and out they go, thousands of trips a day per bee. And back in again with the pollen on their kneecaps. Sometimes the pollen is so big they can’t fit into the openings of the hive. They get enthusiastic, I know how that is. They fly with three times their body weight. Bees have collected these pollen balls in their knee pockets, a little like cargo pants. Entering the hive, the pollen rarely falls off, if it does, another bee comes out, picks it up, and brings it in. They work together. It’s an amazing thing to see how they help each other.

This demonstrates remarkable complex and adaptive behavior. I can’t help but wonder if the Waggle Dance really explains that they have to take public transportation to the food source.

I wrote and illustrated a book called “The Mysterious Traveling Honeybees of Venice.” People thought I made it up. But now some people come up to me and say, “Hey, I saw your bees going to Burano. I saw … ” And on the larger boats, called Traghettos, sometimes they ride on the life preservers at the top. The Traghettos go to Burano or Torcello.  So, they have other places to hang out. When they travel on the Traghettos they usually position themselves outside, at the top, on the life preservers. So keep your eyes open when you’re in Venice.

The natural sunlight in the Honey Garden has a wonderful poetic quality filtering through the foliage. One becomes vividly aware of the sun’s positioning. Overall, I was struck by its graceful, serene beauty and how it evokes contemplation on the interconnectedness of life, provides revelations for the senses, and instills hope. Thank you for the resilience you have created for an ecosystem under climate stress and for making a home for over 200,000 bees.

When I started the garden in a furnace waste yard, I assumed the weather would cooperate…it rained, it snowed, it flooded. We never gave up. After 6 boat loads of soil, 30 fruit trees, and 500 flowering aromatic plants, the bees and hives, there is fantastic honey and healthy and happy, flourishing bee colonies. The sun is out and 12 years later we are enjoying its beauty. Beauty matters and I believe art heals.

Judi Harvest, creates art inspired by nature and endangered species. During her career, she has begun to realize that glassmakers and the field of glassmaking is an endangered species too. Based out of Venice, Italy, and New York City, she has a studio on an island in Murano that she’s worked out of since 1988. She’s witnessed generations of glass artisans vanish, with her building’s occupancy dropping from 77 residential working glass masters to just 5. Her work intertwines protecting the interdependent relationship of bees, bats, and Murano art glass ecosystems from extinction. Concerned with the fragility of life on our planet, her goal is to inspire urgent environmental action. You can follow her on Instagram at: Judi.Harvest and on Facebook at: Judi Harvest. 

View her art at: www.JudiHarvest.com

Gayil Nalls, Ph.D., is the creator of World Sensorium and founder of the World Sensorium/ Conservancy.

Urban agriculture is expected to be an important feature of 21st century sustainability and can have many benefits for communities and cities, including providing fresh produce in neighborhoods with few other options.

Among those benefits, growing food in backyards, community gardens or urban farms can shrink the distance fruits and vegetables have to travel between producers and consumers – what’s known as the “food mile” problem. With transportation’s greenhouse gas emissions eliminated, it’s a small leap to assume that urban agriculture is a simple climate solution.

But is urban agriculture really as climate-friendly as many people think?

Our team of researchers partnered with individual gardeners, community garden volunteers and urban farm managers at 73 sites across five countries in North America and Europe to test this assumption.

We found that urban agriculture, while it has many community benefits, isn’t always better for the climate than conventional agriculture over the life cycle, even with transportation factored in. In fact, on average, the urban agriculture sites we studied were six times more carbon intensive per serving of fruit or vegetables than conventional farming.

However, we also found several practices that stood out for how effectively they can make fruits and vegetables grown in cities more climate-friendly.

What makes urban ag more carbon-intensive?

Most research on urban agriculture has focused on a single type of urban farming, often high-tech projects, such as aquaponic tanks, rooftop greenhouses or vertical farms. Electricity consumption often means the food grown in these high-tech environments has a big carbon footprint.

We looked instead at the life cycle emissions of more common low-tech urban agriculture – the kind found in urban backyards, vacant lots and urban farms.

Our study, published Jan. 22, 2024, modeled carbon emissions from farming activities like watering and fertilizing crops and from building and maintaining the farms. Surprisingly, from a life cycle emissions perspective, the most common source at these sites turned out to be infrastructure. From raised beds to sheds and concrete pathways, this gardening infrastructure means more carbon emissions per serving of produce than the average wide-open fields on conventional farms.

However, among the 73 sites in cities including New York, London and Paris, 17 had lower emissions than conventional farms. By exploring what set these sites apart, we identified some best practices for shrinking the carbon footprint of urban food production.

1) Make use of recycled materials, including food waste and water

Using old building materials for constructing farm infrastructure, such as raised beds, can cut out the climate impacts of new lumber, cement and glass, among other materials. We found that upcycling building materials could cut a site’s emissions 50% or more.

On average, our sites used compost to replace 95% of synthetic nutrients. Using food waste as compost can avoid both the methane emissions from food scraps buried in landfills and the need for synthetic fertilizers made from fossil fuels. We found that careful compost management could cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 40%.

Capturing rainwater or using greywater from shower drains or sinks can reduce the need for pumping water, water treatment and water distribution. Yet we found that few sites used those techniques for most of their water.

2) Grow crops that are carbon-intensive when grown by conventional methods

Tomatoes are a great example of crops that can cut emissions when grown with low-tech urban agriculture. Commercially, they are often grown in large-scale greenhouses that can be particularly energy-intensive. Asparagus and other produce that must be transported by airplane because they spoil quickly are another example with a large carbon footprint.

By growing these crops instead of buying them in stores, low-tech urban growers can reduce their net carbon impact.

3) Keep urban gardens going long term

Cities are constantly changing, and community gardens can be vulnerable to development pressures. But if urban agriculture sites can remain in place for many years, they can avoid the need for new infrastructure and keep providing other benefits to their communities.

Urban agriculture sites provide ecosystem services and social benefits, such as fresh produce, community building and education. Urban farms also create homes for bees and urban wildlife, while offering some protection from the urban heat island effect.

The practice of growing food in cities is expected to continue expanding in the coming years, and many cities are looking to it as a key tool for climate adaptation and environmental justice.

We believe that with careful site design and improved land use policy, urban farmers and gardeners can boost their benefit both to people nearby and the planet as a whole.

Jason “Jake” Hawes is a PhD candidate in the School for Environment and Sustainability, at the University of Michigan. 

Benjamin Goldstein, Assistant Professor of Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan. 

Joshua Newell is a professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan.  

This article was previously published in The Conversation.

After investigating the origin of the species, Charles Darwin lunged into an exploration of something that seemed, by comparison, terribly minute: orchids. By 1862, he’d traveled the world wide and far, encountering incredible organisms like giant tortoises, seafaring iguanas, and fossils of giant ground sloths. But he couldn’t stop thinking about a delicate, white star-shaped flower he’d been sent as a gift by his acquaintance James Bateman, an English horticulturalist with a penchant for rare flora from Madagascar. The flower’s odd shape—with an extremely long nectar pouch hanging under its crown—stirred in him a deep, almost inexplicable fascination.

“Orchids have interested me as much as almost anything in my life,” Darwin wrote. In their forms, he saw a vast landscape of the forces of selective evolution, a dance they played with their environment and their pollinators. “My little darlings,” as he sometimes referred to orchids, became his model for further exploring the forces he so broadly described in The Origin of Species. Just three years after the publication of that shattering work, he had produced his tome puzzling over the multitudinous, striking habits of orchids: On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and On the Good Effects of Intercrossing.

How a single family of flowers could vary so widely—from small and frilly, almost invisible to see, to large, gaudy and with a front pouch—left Darwin baffled. He called this, and flower diversity as a whole, an “abominable mystery.” Indeed, there are upward of 28,000 species of orchids worldwide and new ones cropping up every so often—sometimes even right under our noses. They have made their homes on all contemporary continents save for Antarctica—from the Arctic north, across the equator, and reaching south through all but the tip of South America.

“I think the reason people become obsessed with them is because of that mystery: Why are there so many?” says Jamie Thompson, a life sciences researcher at the University of Bath, in the United Kingdom. Yet the scientific jury is still out—and fervently debating—how many species there are exactly, what secret makes them so brilliant at diversifying, and when and where orchids evolved in the first place. Getting to the bottom of these mysteries could help us better understand the evolutionary dynamism of this massive group of alluring plants, and how we might help them fend off upcoming decimation.

To search for answers, researchers have spent decades digging into the orchid’s past. For plants, fossil records are often hard to come by because soft organic matter is less likely to be preserved than, say, bones. To track when a plant first appeared on this planet, experts now tend to rely on phylogenetic profiling: They use DNA from different species to plot them onto a tree of life, and then use a statistical model to pull them back into the past and recreate their history. 

When, in 2015, researchers used this technique to sequence 39 species from all major orchid groups, as well as data from some fossils, their findings suggested that orchids originated between 102 and 120 million years ago, most likely in Australia.¹ Ancient orchids then spread to the tropics by making their way through Antarctica—which was then connected and flourishing with vegetation. And since then, Southeast Asia is where most of their speciation has taken place.

Or at least, this is currently the leading theory about orchid origins. It may soon be upended, though, according to new preliminary findings.² An international team of researchers has drafted a study using DNA from more than 1,900 species of orchids and pinpointed their origin north, in Laurasia, modern-day Europe, Asia, and North America. The majority of diversification happened just over the past 5 million years, their work suggests, and southern Mesoamerica, such as the lush Costa Rica and Panama, actually hosts the fastest speciation of orchids.

This paper, posted to a preprint site in September, hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, and some outside experts don’t think this new hypothesis is any good. But Oscar Pérez-Escobar, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the United Kingdom, doesn’t think his findings are controversial at all. “Understanding where things come from can help us understand why we have X or Y species, and why there are so many,” Pérez-Escobar says.

Today, it takes a long logbook to account for orchids’ present diversity of appearances and habits. “There’s quite a number of innovations that orchids can do that other plants can’t, or not so well,” says Katharina Nargar, an orchid researcher at James Cook University, in Australia who contributed to the new study.

The neatest and most helpful of these tricks, according to Nargar, is that more than 70 percent of orchids have developed the ability to grow out of tree trunks and branches instead of soil—a capability known as epiphytism. This allows them to exploit new territories other plants cannot use, giving them “free rein,” says Nargar. Studies suggest that epiphytism evolved independently at least 14 times throughout the orchid family tree, and epiphytic orchids are “significantly richer in species” than terrestrial ones, write the authors of one study of their diversity.³ To successfully live in trees, orchids have developed the ability to absorb moisture from the air via a succulent spongy outer coating on their stem and leaves, as well as to use their roots directly to photosynthesize. The Taeniophyllum orchid, for instance, doesn’t even have any leaves: it just uses its roots for all energy production from the sun.

For the species that haven’t evolved to live in trees, the other main running theory for their inexplicable ability to diversify lies in how specialized their flowers are at getting pollinated. For one, some orchid species are the ultimate swingers—they’re very lenient in their sex lives and can produce fertile offspring with orchids from some other species, making them more likely to reproduce and more likely to often birth unique, new hybrid species, according to Nargar.

To ensure pollination, some orchids also strike up an evolutionary deal with local fauna: The plant evolves a flower so intricate it’s only accessible to a couple types of insects, and those insects are sure to only really ever pollinate other orchids. One of these striking examples is the Angraecum sesquipedale, the orchid Darwin had grown obsessed with, which has evolved a 12-inch long and narrow satchel for its nectar so that only the Hawk moth, with an exceptionally long proboscis, can access it. Although Darwin had already mused on this possibility, the moth hadn’t yet been discovered, so his theory was only confirmed almost four decades later, in 1903.

In order to fine-tune their ability to accommodate just certain pollinators, orchids have also grown very meticulous about how they deliver their pollen gifts. Some orchids bundle their pollen in tailor-made, measured, sticky packages and fling them onto their preferred pollinators with precision so that no grains are wasted and lost along the way once they fly off, and they can only be dislodged once they reach their destination. This push to specialize pollen packaging according to available pollinators—maybe a moth, maybe a bee—has also pushed diversification. And it allows one mutant orchid to have a higher chance of having loads of offspring because less pollen goes to waste than with traditionally dispersed grains. The branch of the orchid family tree that has evolved this trick called “pollinia” has a higher speciation rate than orchids that have stuck with traditional pollen grains.⁴

To take their specialization a step further, some orchids have evolved to mimic the mate of their preferred pollinator, or their favorite snack through looks, scent, and the release of special chemicals.⁵ Unknowing insects show up on their flower crown hoping to get lucky, and get duped into picking up the flower’s pollen instead. Ophrys apifera orchids look and smell like female bees. The Hammer orchid eerily resembles a female wasp. The Satyrium pumilum orchid, in South Africa, imitates the scent of dead animals to attract fruit flies, while Disa pulchra orchids pretend to be other nectar-offering flowers, like the pink iris, to fool insects into coming looking for a sweet reward. Since bees, wasps, and butterflies alike would clock the ploy if it were too common, it’s possible this has led orchids to vary in their mimetics as much as possible, spurring the birth of so many different species and tactics.

These unique flower morphology strategies are “fundamental,” to diversification according to Dewi Pramanik, an orchid morphology researcher at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, in the Netherlands. One of her favorites is the Serapias cordigera orchid, which has evolved to shape its hairy, burgundy flower like a comfortable resting place for the Hoplitis adunca male bee, which will conveniently stop to rest there in between bouts of foraging, accidentally pollinating the flower.

Dust-like seeds are also likely among the orchid’s arsenal for rapid diversification. A single orchid seed packet can contain up to 4 million seeds, sometimes as tiny as 0.05 mm in length—the smallest in the plant kingdom—meaning plenty can easily disperse with a single gust of wind. Although most of the dust seeds won’t ever germinate, this tiny seed technique does increase the odds for diversification compared to a plant with a heartier seed bulk because new plants can crop up quickly in new locations without too much energy expenditure, and rapidly adapt accordingly.

Though orchid excellence might not all be down to just tricks pulled by the plants themselves, according to Thompson—there are external factors at play, too. When Thompson ran another phylogenetic statistical analysis on nearly 1,500 species of terrestrial orchids, his data suggested that their diversification “exploded” specifically when temperatures started dropping across the globe, somewhere around 10 million years ago.⁶ Global cooling is 700 times more likely to have influenced the rate at which orchids speciated than just time alone, Thompson says, making orchids “the best example of climate-driven speciation.”

Unfortunately, this also suggests extra trouble for the challenges orchids will face as the world warms. “I think extinction will increase, because a lot of them are cold-adapted, and we’ve seen in Europe, how hot it’s been this year,” says Thompson. Climate changes also put orchids at additional risk due to their hyper-specializing for one pollinator that might die off or be forced out of their habitat.

Going by their evolutionary history, orchids should continue to proliferate, and we should continue to discover new ones. “If you look at the number of orchid species described against time, it’s not really showing any evidence of leveling off,” according to Thomas Givnish, a professor of botany and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who penned that seminal Australia-orchid-origin research. But human-caused climate change and other habitat destruction are spelling out a different future for many of these species of flower.

Some calculations suggest that plant species are dying out at least 500 times faster than before 1900, with orchids high on the threat list. Bangladesh has lost 32 of its 188 identified orchid species since 1996; in the Czech Republic, the suitable habitat for endemic orchids has declined up to 92 percent; in Florida, the number of famed ghost orchid (the sought-after subject of The Orchid Thief) has declined by half; orchids in India are blooming earlier than they should, potentially disrupting pollination. And according to a study published earlier this year, almost 280 known orchid species are in need of “immediate conservation action” but most of these still lack adequate protection.

If most of the diversity arose in the past 10 to 5 million years, the rapid loss of species we’re experiencing now might be too late to counteract, according to Pérez-Escobar. “We are kind of stuck,” he says. “If we don’t protect the orchids that we have left, the time it will take for that orchid diversity to bounce back is millions of years.” He’s on a mission to gather additional international collaboration to sample the DNA of all existing orchid species—however many they may be—because he thinks that will help him definitively plot out the plant’s evolutionary history.

The one thing experts seem to all agree on is that perhaps the best way to come up with strategies to effectively stop orchids’ decline⁷—whether it’s going to be saving the habitats they reside in, focusing on the pollinators they rely on, cutting down on their illegal trade, or all of the above—is to somehow answer the big questions of the “abominable mystery”: What are the secrets to their success in speciation? Further parsing these details about orchid diversity can help conservationists home in on their rapid and wild evolutionary plasticity to, hopefully, give them a fighting chance at adapting to a rapidly changing world.

After all, Darwin, himself noted that orchids had been “eminently useful” for him to learn how every little element, “even most trifling details of structure,” are somehow a result of natural selection.⁸ As he writes in a letter replete with exclamation points to a fellow botanist: “The beauty of the adaptations of parts seems to me unparalleled.” 

Lead image: Rak ter samer / Shutterstock

References

1. Givnish, T.J., et al. Orchid historical biogeography, diversification, Antarctica, and the paradox of orchid dispersal. Journal of Biogeography 43, 1905-1916 (2016).

2. Perez-Escobar, O.A., et al. The origin and speciation of orchids. BioRxiv (2023).

3. Gravendeel, B., Smithson, A., Slik, G.J.W., & Schuiteman, A. Epiphytism and pollinator specialization: Drivers for orchid diversity? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 359, 1523-1535 (2004).

4. Givnish, T.J., et al. Orchid phylogenomics and multiple drivers of their extraordinary diversification. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282, 20151553 (2015).

5. Ackerman, J.D., et al. Beyond the various contrivances by which orchids are pollinated: Global patterns in orchid pollination biology. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 202, 295-324 (2023).

6. Thompson, J.B., Davis, K.E., Dodd, H.O., Wills, M.A., & Priest, N.K. Speciation across the Earth driven by global cooling in terrestrial orchids. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, e2102408120 (2023).

7. Fay, M.F. Orchid conservation: How can we meet the challenges in the twenty-first century? Botanical Studies 59, 16 (2018).

8. Darwin, C. Letter to J.D. Hooker. Darwin Correspondence Project. University of Cambridge (1862).

Sofia Quaglia is a freelance journalist writing about all things science. Her work has appeared in Discover Magazine, The New York Times, National Geographic, Guardian, and more. You can follow her on Twitter at @sofiquaglia.

This article was previously published in Nautilus.

In the lush forests of Brunei, Indonesia, and the Philippines, dwells Rafflesia, one of the most mysterious and enigmatic flowers on Earth. Parasitic in nature, the plant itself has neither leaves nor roots, living most of its life hidden from view as a web of filaments inside the vines of another plant called the Tetrastigma.

After four to six years of germination, the Rafflesia pops a bud—a brown cabbage-like sphere the size of a soccer ball—through its host’s tissue that may take up to nine months to bloom. Opening unexpectedly, almost always at night, the bud erupts into a stunning, five-lobed red blossom, over three feet in diameter—the biggest flower on the planet.

Its scent, however, makes a mockery of its beauty: Rafflesias smell like rotten meat.

Rafflesia has been known to scientists for about 200 years—and has been used in botanical medicine by the Indigenous populations of Southeast Asia for much longer. Yet, it is so rare and invisible most of the time that scientists know very little about its unusual biology.

“There are definitely more questions than answers,” says Chris Thorogood, deputy director of the University of Oxford Botanic Garden. Thorogood belongs to a niche group of scientists who call themselves Rafflesiologists. This self-selected group worries the curious flowers will disappear and take their botanical secrets with them—before they are even understood.

Scientists have cataloged 42 Rafflesia species—with new species identified every year—but most of these are edging toward extinction as humans decimate their forest habitat to clear room for agriculture. Thorogood and his team recently published a paper calling for the preservation of the species. Among other things, they suggest making the flower “an icon” for plant conservation in the Asian tropics. (It already likely inspired one of the more popular Pokémon characters, Vileplume, which scatters toxic pollen that can trigger allergy attacks.)

What we do know about Rafflesia is both majestic and macabre. Rafflesia evolved its stink to attract different types of pollinating insects—not bees or wasps, who favor fragrant blooms, but flies, which prefer foul smells. “If you want to attract a fly rather than a bee, you don’t want to smell nice,” says Thorogood. Flies prefer decomposing flesh, as that’s where they lay their eggs. With its deep red hues, even the appearance of Rafflesia’s massive flower mimics, to some extent, the flesh of a dead animal. In fact, there’s nothing there for the larvae to eat. “They may sometimes lay their eggs on the flower, and then their offspring will just perish,” Thorogood explains. It’s a bit of a dead end, as it were.

But the Rafflesiologists are still trying to figure out how the pollination process works. Rafflesia plants are either male or female, and the male ones produce a thick, sticky sludge of yellow pollen. “It looks like butter that has been left out of the fridge, when it gets really soft,” says Thorogood. As flies enter the male flowers hunting for a place to lay their eggs, the pollen rubs onto their bodies. But what happens after that is an open question: One would think the flies would then carry it to a female plant and pollinate it. But because the blooms are so rare, it’s unlikely that any flies will find one nearby, Thorogood says. The plant may produce seeds, but scientists are still debating how they disperse. Some insist that ants help spread the seeds around in the jungle. Others believe that small forest animals may swallow the seeds—and poop them out. “We don’t have a united account of how the seeds are distributed,” Thorogood admits. So far, cultivation of the plant has proven difficult.

In their study, Thorogood and colleagues outline a few avenues to saving the massive stinkers—from propagating Rafflesia outside their native places to designating habitat protections to raising awareness through ecotourism, as some local conservation groups have done. “If people don’t have an awareness or care, [the species] won’t win this battle,” Thorogood says. His team hopes that the growing conservation efforts to save the world’s biggest stinker of a flower will bear fruit. 

Lead photo by Chris Thorogood.

Lina Zeldovich grew up in a family of Russian scientists, listening to bedtime stories about volcanoes, black holes, and intrepid explorers. She has written for The New York Times, Scientific American, Reader’s Digest, and Audubon Magazine, among other publications, and won four awards for covering the science of poop. Her book, The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth, was published in 2021 by Chicago University Press. You can find her at LinaZeldovich.com and @LinaZeldovich.

This article was previously published in Nautilus.

In June, I crossed the Atlantic with my partner for a much-needed vacation. A leg of the trip brought us to Avignon, in southern France, where in the fourteenth century, due to the fluctuations of religious and political strife, the seat of the papacy, undertook a brief exile. The medieval city is organized around the stark, towering Palais des Papes, essentially a castle, which has the vast stone walls of a Game of Thrones set piece. Visitors to the Palais are given a tablet which, carried from room to room, filters the severe chambers, with their faded tapestries and accumulated centuries of scratchiti, through a digital time machine. A dark, cavernous fireplace fills with computer-generated flames, and suddenly you are a guest in the palace kitchen, or at least, this is the intention. If the augmented reality was underwhelming, the pontifical garden were not. It revealed itself beyond the battlements and chambers. The Palais des Papes has an official website, which narrates the creation of the garden as follows:

Bishop of Avignon in 1310, Jacques Duèse became Pope John XXII in 1316 and settled in Avignon. He annexed the neighboring buildings of the episcopal palace, and had the adjacent stables rebuilt. An orchard was redeveloped in 1324: the ground was leveled, trees and lawns were planted, a watering system was put in place, a wall was built to close off the area. The foundations of the pontifical gardens [were] laid.

What I remember most about the walled garden was my first encounter with an artichoke blossom. The size of a human hand, it was a purple explosion, gorgeous and slightly frightening, the kind of organism (like a vampire squid or a banyan tree) that stretches the human formal imagination merely by existing.

In the months since my return, I kept thinking about these blossoms, the garden, and the palace walls that concealed them. The common globe artichoke is a cultivar of its parent, the wild cardoon (Cynara cardunculus), with “cardoon” referring both to this ancestor as well as, more commonly, to the leafy cardoon. This separate cultivar yields an edible stalk and leaves. The artichoke, on the other hand, was selectively bred through the Middle Ages to produce the familiar “heart,” nestled within its own palatial series of semi-edible, discretely thorned leaves. If it isn’t apparent yet, the more I thought about the artichoke, the more it came to resemble the pontifical garden in which I encountered it.

Is this a coincidence, a metaphor? The centuries-long selective breeding of the globe artichoke has been obscured over time but may have begun around the turn of the first millennium in Rome, spreading throughout the Mediterranean from there.¹ Over the next five hundred or so years, in addition to selecting for the gigantism of the head (or “heart”) of the plant, Medieval gardeners produced specimens with more, bigger, and tougher leaves. The effect was that the artichoke increasingly resembled a fortress protecting its own Edenic pleasure garden, the rich and savory heart, just as the battlements of the Palais guarded the putatively holy workings of the Papacy, not only the political and liturgical wranglings but the intellectual pursuits of church functionaries with ample downtime.

One of these pursuits was the cultivation of a philosophy eventually described as “humanism,” which sometimes resembles an ink blot more than a coherent philosophical movement. Is humanism a rejection of theology, a return to “the classics”? Is it an embrace of science, empiricism, and positivism, those means by which humans observe and measure the real, or is it a turn inward, a reliance upon the reasoning intellect? Foundationally, the major humanists display a deep commitment to reason and the rational. But given that proto-racist prejudices condemned vast populations of humans as incapable of reason, “humanism” perversely enjoyed its ascendance at the same time as the dual moral disasters of colonization and the slave trade.²

Rene Descartes, arch-rationalist, is often identified as the premier philosophical author of this solipsistic, perhaps narcissistic movement “inward,” but antecedents have been found in, for example, the ecstatic Spanish nun Teresa of Avila, whose Interior Castle conceived of meditative practice as a journey to the center of a castle.³ Earlier still, and in the city of Avignon no less, Petrarch arrived at a humanistic ethos through his engagement with Greek and Roman philosophy and literature. Petrarch worked for the church for many years, and likely passed through the walls of the Palais while developing his thoughts on the relation between self and world. Did he pass by the pontifical gardens? Did he smell the flowers?

In remembering, and meditating over, the artichoke blossom in the garden of the Palais des Papes, I have found myself building associations: artichoke, walled garden, castle, humanism, and meditation itself in certain iterations. Returning to my earlier question, I wonder if this is the human practice of metaphor-working, or whether these are all effects of a common, culturally specific, formal, and imaginary movement. It would be a medieval-feudal tendency to build castles, to protect the self through rigid battlements, and to value it above human and non-human and more-than-human others.

To speculate whether this manifests in the form of the artichoke only appears ridiculous if we do not recall that generations of selective breeding for traits desirable to humans is an ongoing practice and that humans are co-authors in the collaboration with organisms across centuries.

When I approached the artichoke blossom to look at it more closely, I noticed bees working their blissful way through the forest of the bloom for nectar and pollen.

The artichoke, to bloom, must explode beyond the walls of its own castle, in the process withholding its heart from at least one form of human enjoyment (I like mine with lemon, garlic, and olive oil). This is just a different aesthetic, a movement away from a selectively bred gustatory reward, and toward a more ancestral, non-modern beauty, a beauty that is also alien, even slightly frightening.

I am wondering now about the self, a “humanist” concept of the self as worthy of privilege and priority above and beyond the non-self, the abundant other, which we carry with us, along with perhaps a more innate and stubborn tendency to build castles—in the sky, but also everywhere else—and what it might mean to bloom away, outward, beyond. The artichoke blossom exceeds human design and desire, exploding its own battlements and thereby entering the symbiogenetic fray of interspecies collaboration. Perhaps in the blossoming of the artichoke I perceived, surprisingly enough, a revolutionary politics, one that foregoes the (always-classed, always-racialized) hierarchy of human privilege in favor of relationships of mutual care and, one might hope, healing.

Sam Stoeltje, PhD, is a professor at Utica University. He/They specialize in Religious Studies, Critical and Decolonial Theory, and Epistemic Justice.

1Gabriella Sonnante, Domenico Pignone, Karl Hammer. “The Domestication of Artichoke and Cardoon: From Roman Times to the Genomic Age.” Annals of Botany 100: 5 (2007).

2Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (Fall 2003).

3Christia Mercer, “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Ávila, or Why We Should Work on Women in the History of Philosophy,” Philosophical Studies, vol. 174, no. 10, 2017.

In the early 1990s Mark and Jean Shepard bought a degraded 106-acre corn field in Viola, Wisconsin, and over the following decades, restored it to the native oak savanna it had once been long ago, while also creating a natural perennial farm of native flora, growing chestnuts, hazelnuts, apples, cherries and more. Mark wrote the book Restoration Agriculture about how to imitate nature’s explicit formulas for success known through biomimicry. Filmmaker Kirsten Dirksen chronicles their ongoing hands-on story told by Mark in the informative video Homestead Paradise which can be viewed on YouTube.

Biomimicry draws inspiration from nature by emulating biological processes, systems, and structures so that we can achieve new compatible products and systems. This approach is being applied to many fields; however, biomimicry is playing a particularly important role in guiding ecosystem restorations. By understanding how plants interact with their environment and contribute to the ecological balance, degraded land can be restored, resembling the forms and functions of local healthy nature.

A big problem around the world is the challenge of bringing back natural habitat to areas degraded by deforestation, desertification, and agricultural mismanagement. The most promising innovative, and holistic approaches for restoring these areas to ecological harmony involve drawing inspiration from nature’s strategies through biomimicry. In the West and elsewhere, river and stream, and wetland restoration projects, are using beaver mimicry structures to help restore aquatic habitats with great success. These low-tech water constructions are often made from woven willow branches stabilized by wood pilings or river rock structures.

The fields of plant conservation and biomimicry both share a common interest in understanding and learning from the natural world and a responsible and sustainable approach to problem-solving. In addition to exclusively conserving nature, we must understand, imitate, and value it as fundamental to culture and ecosystem services. Biomimicry is currently playing a vital role in our understanding of why we must preserve forests and other plants for their carbon sequestration and is enhancing our insights for the creation of carbon capture and storage technologies including biomimicry filters. To address the pollinator crisis, the field of robotics is studying plant-pollinator interactions to design robots and drones that mimic the pollination process. Insect-inspired robots, such as Robo Bees guided by artificial intelligence (AI) are already supporting vertical farming operations.

Throughout human time, plants have been the traditional source of medicinal treatments. Efforts to conserve rare and endangered plant species, many with important medicinal properties, are being aided now by biomimicry research and screening methods identifying novel bioactive compounds, and increasing a reconnect with the ethos of biodiversity conservation.

Biomimicry Ecosystem Restoration initiatives begin by profoundly studying the closest healthy, thriving ecosystems and understanding what species and solutions are at work. What varieties of native plant selections should be mimicked? How are these species interacting and how are nutrients being recycled? This process helps in selecting native plants well adapted to the local environmental conditions and that naturally contribute to soil stabilization, water systems, and nutrient recycling. The goal is to restore biodiversity and create polyculture with diverse species of plants and animals that offer broad ecosystem services supporting each other. A traditional example of polycropping is the Three Sisters method where beans, corn, and squash are grown together. The three different plants service each other by corn providing support for beans to grow upward, beans producing nitrogen, and squash covering the ground to protect the plants from weeds and help retain moisture.

The key to reversing land degradation is understanding the processes taking place in healthy areas that are replenishing the soil and improving its health. This will help with soil management strategies for the degraded soil areas and depleted soil carbon. For instance, it is imperative to identify what plants, microorganisms, and fungi, are present in healthy local ecosystems that can inform the soil strategy for the degraded area.

Biomimicry uses the ingenious systems that nature has evolved over eons, allowing for the transformation of a degraded system. A restored ecosystem becomes resilient, functional, and productive. Monitoring the ecosystem over the years allows for adjustments and adaptive management for changing conditions.

Overall, combining the principles of biomimicry and plant conservation can lead to sustainable solutions. These paired practices not only benefit human societies but increase the efficiency and resilience of natural ecosystems making it possible for all to thrive. The wisdom of nature is a great mentor.

Gayil Nalls is an interdisciplinary artist, gardener, and conservationist. She is the founder of World Sensorium / Conservancy and editor of its journal Plantings.