One of the most wonderful things about working as a botanist is the sheer number of plants that are out there. It is estimated that there are 400,000 species on Earth – I say estimated, because more than 1,000 are recorded as new to science each year so no plant scientist can ever know all of them.
And it’s this incredible diversity that occasionally throws up something that captures our imagination – so much that our passion to grow them sets off ripples that revolutionise not just horticulture, but the entire way we live our lives, even architecture. A classic example of this can be found in the most unlikely of places: the upper tributaries of the Amazon rainforest.
