You know, I am beginning to think I have a superpower, albeit one that only manifests itself in very specific circumstances. Whenever someone finds out what I do for a living, I can predict with unwavering certainty what their next question to me will be. Whether it’s in an interview with the press, in chats with cabbies, or discussions with non-botany colleagues: “So, what first made you interested in plants?” It’s a question that is almost always accompanied with a look of incredulity, and heavy emphasis on the word “plants”. Then comes: “Does it run in your family?”; “Did you have a particularly inspirational teacher at school?”; “Is it a cultural thing in Asia?”
Yet no one has ever asked my football-mad big brother what it was that first caused him to take an interest in sport. Trust me, I was curious, so I called him once to double-check. It’s never instantly attributed to some kind of epiphany moment, mysterious external influence or somehow – ahem – stitched into his DNA. To me, the great irony is, I see this question precisely the other way round. I find plants so intrinsically fascinating, and have done since my earliest memories, the very idea that some people aren’t as obsessed with every aspect of them as I am is totally bizarre. After all, as a plant scientist I know that billions of years of co-evolution alongside the botanical world has directly determined every aspect of our culture, civilisation, even our basic biology. In a very real sense, plants made us human.
