Heart And Flowers

By Roger Rosenblatt/St. Louis

PETER RAVEN The World Is His Garden: Better Tread Carefully

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. --Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Think of it!" says Peter Raven, the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, as he stands beside a table in the rare-book room of the garden's library and reads aloud from the final paragraph of Darwin's Origin of Species. "All that difference, elaborately constructed, produced by laws!"

Then he rereads the entire paragraph, which gives one chills, partly for Darwin's understatement. What the author deemed "interesting to contemplate" was nothing less than the world's biological structure, which he (and others) had discovered, and which now, at the end of his monumental study, he quietly celebrated in sublime summation. The "tangled bank" he had initially attributed to an unnamed power, but in the third and subsequent editions, he included God in the evolutionary process. The book now ends on this glorious sentence, over which Raven exults: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

The passage is beloved by Raven because it is a celebration of biodiversity, the most elegant since Genesis, and it is the cause of biodiversity--of maintaining endangered plants and preserving the wilderness--that drives all he has done with the Missouri Garden for nearly 30 years. Rather than being merely a place where pretty flowers are on show (though it is that as well), the garden is a microcosm of the wide green world. It is not a zoo for plant life. The last thing Raven wants is to create a repository for the vegetation that has been destroyed outside the garden.

Thus he rails in speeches against the menace of a "sixth extinction," one unlike the prior five extinction spasms, the last of which came 66 million years ago. Those were brought about by natural phenomena. When it occurs, the sixth mass extinction of living organisms will be brought about by people, by a mushrooming population that has doubled in 40 years, to 6 billion, and by human carelessness and commerce. In the 21st century, which Raven would like to see called "the age of biology," he says we must learn to "master the diversity of living organisms and use the properties of those organisms as a kind of palette to build sustainability."

Instead of cultivating one garden, he looks to everyone's. He protects, collects, lobbies, studies, preserves and expands his territory. He networks like a press agent but believes it is up to individuals to keep what's living living. "When it ends up," he tells me, "the world is not going to be one homogenized place. It's going to have bright spots, richer places and more beautiful places. And the reason that will happen is that individuals took responsibility and did something." As it was in the beginning, the world is a garden.

So Raven looks to the wide world to build other countries' capacities for sustainable development. Two areas that he regards as especially critical are Madagascar and the northern Andes. Madagascar has half as many plants as all tropical Africa (about 11,000), and the great majority are found nowhere else. The Missouri Garden has been active there since the early 1970s, helping train and support the country in evaluating and protecting threatened areas. In the northern Andes, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are home to at least one-fifth of the world's biodiversity, including perhaps 60,000 species of plants, endangered by development and poorly studied. The garden has been cooperating with these nations to help them work out their own plans for the wise use of resources. Raven is volubly opposed to anything that smacks of American big-footedness in these endeavors.

His is one of those special minds that succeed with both the particular and the general, with individual and collaborative pursuits. His boyhood in San Francisco was spent roving vacant lots, searching for specimens. An only child, he began growing caterpillars into butterflies at the age of six. At eight he became a student member of the California Academy of Sciences. At 12 he joined the Sierra Club. At 15 he discovered a member of the heather family, a Presidio manzanita, which had not been seen for 50 years. This subspecies, Ravenii, was later named for him. He did his undergraduate work at Berkeley, got his Ph.D. at UCLA and entered teaching, but not a cloister; he also developed a gift for bringing people together for worthwhile projects.

All this training has produced a 62-year-old man of appealing parts. He dresses like a banker and has the face of a kid who is ready to be pleasantly surprised. In conversation he remembers every ball he has tossed in the air, and just when you think that a long discourse is about to fall off the earth, he brings it tidily home. His voice lilts upward, giving everything he says, including instructions to his staff, confidence with gentleness. And he is funny--not so much on his own, but he likes to quote the witty things said by others, drawing on material from a range of sources that include Lincoln, Oscar Wilde and Joe Garagiola.

He leads me on a tour of his world, which like the greater world, having grown from a simple beginning, has evolved into some wonderful forms. The garden is both terrestrial and a dreamscape, a deliberate arrangement of living things that makes one forget about time and engages all the senses without demanding logic. It is the outer life meant to reverberate in the inner life, which is what it evidently does for Raven.

This oldest botanical garden west of the Mississippi opened to the public in 1859, the same year Origin of Species was published, and was the inspiration of an Englishman, Henry Shaw. In 1819, at 18, Shaw arrived in the river town of St. Louis and took half a day's horseback ride westward until he came to a piece of ground that his imagination claimed. When he became rich 20 years later, he bought the property and turned it into a horticultural display that today, thanks largely to Raven's benign manifest destiny, covers 79 acres and extends its research work over much of the globe.

Raven has a very green thumb. Under him the garden has recently acquired a multimillion-dollar research center from Monsanto, and he is looking toward a $146 million Donald Danforth Plant Center, named for the former president of Ralston Purina. The garden advertises almost as many names of donors as of plants. The library contains 122,000 volumes. Tropicos, a botanical database, attracts thousands of hits a month. When Raven first came to the garden in 1971, he had 85 employees and a budget of $650,000. Today there are 354 people on staff, and the budget is $20 million.

Among the garden's components are an azalea-rhododendron garden that explodes with color--red, pink, yellow and white in April; Linnean House, one of the last buildings constructed by Shaw, where camellias bloom in late winter; a bulb garden (tulips, hyacinths, narcissuses); a scented garden (geraniums and lamb's ears); two rose gardens; a garden for irises and day lilies; a garden for aquatic plants; a Japanese garden; an English garden. The most visually impressive structure is the Climatron, a geodesic greenhouse dome a la R. Buckminster Fuller that rises 70 ft. at the center and measures 175 ft. in diameter at the base. It covers half an acre but appears much larger--a whole tropical rain forest under glass.

Raven and I walk around it beneath a vast green umbrella that looks more lush than a real rain forest. There are a droning of bugs and a loud rush of falling water. We make our way among a density of exotic plants, an endangered Hawaiian plant called alula, a cacao tree, conifers and vines that trap insects. A banyan tree towers on its stilts. A red-and-black bird flits in the branches.

"That's something I haven't seen before," says Raven, noting the pale lavender of a particular iris. He stares at the flower with innocent interest. "Stay here long enough," he says, "and you appreciate what Darwin meant when he wrote in praise of differences." A sign at the exit exhorts visitors to save the rain forest "before it is too late." On the way out I am stopped by an orchid whose rose-colored leaves alternate with gold. The leaves are shaped like fragments of bells.

The admiration of the garden's appearance Raven leaves to me and other tourists; he acknowledges that the plants and flowers are lovely, but his attentions go elsewhere. Before he became an eco-administrator and a biopolitician, Raven was a pure and first-rate scientist--still is--and he views science--process--as the garden's most important exhibit. Apart from his grander design of using the place as a reminder that the world calls out to be preserved, his mission is to make the garden the largest plant-research center in the world. Current projects, which are huge, include volumes on the flora of North America and China.

He seems especially at home in the herbarium. With nearly 5 million specimens, it is sort of the garden morgue. Here are dried samples mounted on sheets of paper, each with a record of discovery--who found what when. Some specimens go back 300 years. The herbarium is a storehouse of diversity, organized in manageable units. I watch him hold a page of bug-nibbled leaves and stare with the wonder one might reserve for orchids.

But Raven is equally himself with the bigger picture, which accounts for his affection for Darwin's last paragraph. In his office in the late afternoon, he returns to the world outside his garden. "Individuals express themselves through others," he says. "They influence other people, they share values, and that way an individual's life goes on, generation after generation.

"The earth is the only place we know in the universe with living organisms; thus it is special. With 6 billion people on the planet, it becomes harder and harder to measure the effects of individuals, yet the outcome is formed precisely by the interaction of individuals. All that adds up to the ongoing stream of humanity and human accomplishment. We have relatively short lives, and yet by preserving the world in a condition that is worthy of us, we win a kind of immortality. We become stewards of what the world is."

"Gardeners?" I ask him. "Gardeners," he says.

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