The Garden of Evolution – planting with an urgent message

Something really important happened at this year’s Gardeners’ World Live event; the headline show garden made plant evolution sexy!
Looking at botanical advancement over 490 billion years could have been deadly dull, but the glamour and magnetic eloquence of Professor Alice Roberts and the skill and enthusiasm of her talented designer, Professor David Stevens, resulted in a stunning garden that was engaging, quirky and beautiful.

I was lucky enough to have a preview of the garden with other members of the Garden Media Guild and Alice swept in to give us the full lowdown, having just had to round up and relocate some trilobites who had managed to get themselves into the wrong geological era.

Both Alice and David wore their academia lightly as they described in layman’s terms how the oceanic single-celled algae first harnessed the sun’s energy through photosynthesis. This not only provided the base level of all food chains but also created an atmosphere rich in oxygen that later facilitated the rise of animal life.

Once these pioneer plants had developed a plumbing system in the form of xylem and phloem, taller plants such as horsetail and ferns were possible.

Over the next millennia giant treeferns and cycads covered the earth and their buried remains fuelled the Industrial Revolution in more recent history in the form of coal deposits. But note that these plants still had no flowers or seeds; they reproduced by means of spores.

After a bit of a fright in the Permian period when volcanic eruptions caused a major extinction event, the spread of this leafy vegetation continued alongside the rise of the dinosaurs into the Jurassic period. Taller trees such as gingkos, swamp cypress, and giant redwoods developed. We saw the arrival of naked seeds, not encased in seed pods or fruits, for the first time.

We all know what eventually happened to the dinosaurs. But for botanists, the most arresting occurrence in this era of geology was the appearance of a novel tree, a magnolia, which had a peculiar appendage called a ‘flower’. The only insects around were beetles so the open structure of Magnolia grandiflora which we still see today evolved to facilitate pollinators who arrived by foot rather than on the wing.

Once this first flowering plant appeared, the floodgates opened for more, and winged insects evolved alongside to form the complex and beautiful partnerships we witness daily in our gardens.

It’s only since the last ice age (the blink of an eye in the geological timeline) that we humans started to ‘farm’ plants in any sort of organised manner, and it has been one family of plants that now predominately feeds us. The evolution of hominids coincided with a drying climate that favoured grasslands and, in the form of e.g wheat, barley, oats and rice, these plants still form staple foods worldwide.

What made this garden stand out was the combination of the high level of artistry from its designer with the sense of fun he and Alice obviously shared in the sourcing of appropriate plants and replica fossils that dotted the garden. Cycads from Paignton Zoo, a reconstruction of the early hominid Australopithecus afarensis , (affectionately named ‘Lucy,’) from the museum it was currently being displayed at, 3D printing creations of significant fossil animals …..

But there was an urgent underlying theme, and the garden ends with a salutary message. The shifts in climate and atmospheric composition represented in the garden happened gradually over immense periods of time, allowing plant and animal life to adapt and evolve. The current rate of climate change is so rapid that species cannot keep up – we are entering unknown and slightly terrifying territory into which more research is needed.

That this garden was awarded ‘Best in Show’ and given a Platinum Medal was almost beside the point. This was an important garden with an important message that deserves to be widely shared. I would love to see a version of its theme at Chelsea Flower Show in years to come.

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