‘Best job in the natural world': seed collector enlisted as modern-day Darwin to document the world's plants

The Guardian

3 days ago

It was described as 'the best job in the natural world': an expedition botanist for Cambridge University Botanic Garden who would follow in the footsteps of Charles Darwin and go on plant-collecting adventures around the world.
Within days of the job advertisement going viral, six people had sent it to Matthew Jeffery and suggested he apply.
'I was already working as a tree seed collector for the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens, collecting native trees from across the UK, and I'd done a lot of European plant exploring – particularly of alpine plants – on holidays with friends,' says Jeffery, 31, who has degrees in biology and plant taxonomy and had worked in horticulture at Chelsea Physic Garden and Kew.
After realising he had the right skills for the unique role, which involves organising and leading international expeditions to collect and observe wild plants and seeds, he decided to apply. 'Every job I've done has been a dream job for me – I've been very lucky – but this job has an incredible potential to work in diverse places and with diverse plants,' he says. 'It was too good an opportunity to pass up.'
Jeffery was appointed in March: it is believed to be the first time a British botanic garden has hired an expedition botanist in modern history. 'It's very daunting,' he says – but also inspiring. 'I learn a lot more from talking to people from different places about local plants and their uses than I could ever learn from reading about them in a book. Different cultural viewpoints and histories can also completely change how you perceive something, and add value and insight, so when you come back to the UK, you have a totally different outlook on how you would grow these plants, treat them or even think about them.'
Like Darwin, he is excited about exploring the world and hopes to make discoveries with the help of the expert botanists he will encounter. 'It would be really cool to find a new species,' he says. 'Obviously, the people from the country we're working in would be best placed to find that, but just to be there when it happens.'
In preparation for his first trip, Jeffery was given advanced wilderness medical training on how to survive and deliver first aid in a remote environment. 'Most of the risks and dangers of the expeditions are the same as they would be in the UK, because there are very few places left in the world that are really extreme and remote – but I might be going to some of those places,' he says.
Jeffery recently returned from his first expedition to Croatia where he and his colleague, Andrea Topalovic Arthan, worked with botanists from the University of Zagreb to collect seeds and record data about plants in wet grasslands. 'This is a habitat under threat because of land use change and increasing drought levels,' he says.
Seeds they brought home included Eriophorum latifolium, a cottongrass that is rare in Croatia but grows well in the UK. On Plješevica mountain, they also collected data about populations of alpine and subalpine plants, including high-altitude saxifraga and bellflowers known as Edraianthus, taking samples to press and dry for the herbarium in Cambridge.
Working alongside local botanists on such expeditions means seeds and knowledge are shared across international borders, helping to ensure rare and threatened plant populations can be protected and boosted in a plant's country of origin, as well as in Cambridge, Jeffery says.
After an expedition to South Africa this summer, he is planning to collect more wild seeds from Croatia in September. These will be brought home to Cambridge to diversify the botanic garden's living collection and aid scientific research and conservation.
'What's so interesting about Croatia is the environmental gradient across the country: the coast has a dry Mediterranean climate and as you go inland it becomes much more temperate and continental European,' he says.
At the border between the two climates, plants that like cooler, wetter conditions grow next to Mediterranean plants that prefer dry heat. 'And the species overlap quite considerably – so the plants growing at those borders potentially have the capacity to deal with both climates to some degree. They are more adaptable than usual, one way or the other.'
Within the space of a few metres, the habitat and species composition of the plants change completely. 'That shows they are very adapted to their specific niche. But it also shows how under threat they could be – how easily you could lose that whole population if the environment changes slightly.'
It was while he was in the isolated grasslands with his Croatian colleagues, observing the plants, that the unique set of challenges an expedition botanist must face hit home for the first time. 'There was a mother bear with her cub in the area and we were warned she was very aggressive.'
Their only means of defence, he says, was to make as much noise as possible 'so the bear would be aware we were there' and avoid them.
As the light started to fade, Jeffery's Croatian colleague Katarina Husnjak Malovec came up with a novel solution: loudly playing a mixture of Croatian music and 80s and 90s hits from her phone. 'We now have a bear deterrent soundtrack,' he says.
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