Word: gardened
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...