Times of the Islands Spring 2017

green pages newsletter of the department of environment & coastal resources
From left: An assortment of orchids rests in the Tropical Nursery. When they bloom, they may be moved into the public display glasshouses.
The snapdragon vine Maurandya anthrhinniflora growing in a pair of two-inch pots displays an unprecedented potential rarely realised in TCI.
cies, grown from seed tested for germination by Kew’s
Millennium Seed Bank, sit neatly spaced awaiting hopeful
inclusion in the limited space of the public glasshouses.
Not all will achieve this stardom—the competition is
fierce—but to their keepers, they are every bit as dear
even behind the scenes. Their siblings, which are still
seeds, are now stored for long-term conservation in the
Millennium Seed Bank’s deep underground freezers,
lying in wait to be used to save the species should some
catastrophe befall wild populations.
But they have other siblings as well. Seeds from most
conservation collections made in TCI are split before they
are shipped to the United Kingdom, and a small share
goes to the Native Plant Conservation Nursery at the
Government Agricultural Station in Kew, North Caicos.
There, they live in a ramshackle, breezy shade-house
rather than a coddling glasshouse. They are protected
from too much sun by shade-cloth, rather than being
exposed to the transparent glass roof of the Tropical
Nursery. They tend to grow a little more tough and compact,
while their London brethren relax into a looser,
tenderer growth habit.
Just like anyone who leaves their original home to
expand their experiences abroad, these plants change
and develop new potential when grown in the Tropical
Nursery. One, a spindly winder called snapdragon vine
Maurandya antirhinniflora I remember from my youth on
the roadsides of Cork Tree in Grand Turk, creeps thinly
through thorny Acacia trees, flowering sparingly. Its baby
blue flowers, looking like frilly little cornucopias, and
sharply triangular leaves make it look like it would be a
real winner in the garden if only it grew with a little more
gusto. Seeing it growing in the Tropical Nursery verified
that—even when bound in tiny pots, the lush foliage and
abundant flowers, vines mounded upon themselves, made
me ask why the plant wasn’t already on public display.
“This looks a lot better than that junky plastic-looking
Hoya they’ve got festooning every ledge in the P.O.W.,” I
said to my colleague there, with an upturned palm and a
single raised eyebrow. In the relatively cool, humid, dim
conditions of the Tropical Nursery (compared to the full
sun, salty drought, and dusty tradewinds of Grand Turk)
the plant can afford to relax and put on a little more
body.
Similarly, I recall when the San Diego Zoo’s horticulture
team grew out seeds found in wild Turks & Caicos
rock iguana droppings for identification for a diet study,
and some of the mystery seeds from Big Ambergris Cay
turned out to be the National Flower, Turks & Caicos
heather Limonium bahamense. But after six months of
growing in the upper 70s, humid, sunny world of southern
California’s Mediterranean climate the heather,
normally a stiff, tough, upright scrub-brush of a plant
just a hand-length high, had changed. It had grown so
leggy and lax that it had to be planted in a hanging basket;
its succulent stems dangled scandently, heavy under
their own weight and turning up at the tips just enough
to show some I-just-woke-up flowers, spread out along
the stem. It didn’t look like a plant that had given up, it
just looked like a plant so spoiled rotten from its origin
in the hypersaline salt marshes of the Turks Islands that
had become as cheerily apathetic as a garden petunia.
38 www.timespub.tc