International | Botany and bureaucracy

A dying breed

Specimen-hunting has become less dangerous, but takes persistence

Sep 10th 2015

PLANT-COLLECTING has long attracted mavericks with a thirst for adventure. In Borneo in the 1960s John Wood, now at Oxford University, had to shave leeches off his legs with a machete. In the 1970s, at the outbreak of Lebanon’s civil war, Geoff Hawtin, now a trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, drove a collection of legumes down a mined road to the Syrian border (and back again when he found it was closed). In the 1980s Daniel Debouck, a Belgian bean-collector based in Colombia, narrowly escaped capture by narcos in Mexico and guerrillas in Peru.

This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline “A dying breed”