My aunt often took me to the Natural History Museum in London, where there was a fossil garden full of ancient lycopod trees, Lepidodendra, their trunks covered with rugged rhomboid scales like crocodiles, and the slender trunks of tree horsetails, Calamites. Inside the museum, she took me to see the dioramas of the Paleozoic (they had titles like ‘Life in a Devonian Swamp’) – I loved these even more than the pictures in Marie Stopes’ book, and they became my new dreamscapes. I wanted to see these giant plants alive, straightaway, and felt heartbroken when she told me that there were no more tree horsetails, no more club-moss trees, the old giant flora was all gone, vanished – though much of it, she added, had sunk into the swamps, where it had been compressed and transformed into coal over the eons (once, at home, she split a coal ball and showed me the fossils inside).
Then we would move ahead 100 million years, to the dioramas of the Jurassic (‘The Age of Cycads’), and she would show me these great robust trees, so different from the Paleozoic ones. The cycads had huge cones and massive fronds at their tops – they were the dominant plant form once, she would say; pterodactyls flew among them, they were what the giant dinosaurs munched on. Although I had never seen a living cycad, these great trees with their thick, solid trunks seemed more believable, less alien, than the unimaginable Calamites and Cor-daites which had preceded them – they looked like a cross between ferns and palms.[77]
On summer Sundays, we would take the old District Line to Kew – the line had been opened in 1877, and many of the original electric carriages were still in use. It cost 1d. to enter, and for this one had the whole sweep of the Garden, its broad walks, its dells, the eighteenth-century Pagoda, and my favorites, the great glass and iron conservatories.
A taste for the exotic was fostered by visits to the giant water lily Victoria regia, in its own special house – its vast leaves, my aunt told me, could easily bear the weight of a child. It had been discovered in the wilds of Guyana, she said, and given its name in honor of the young queen.[78]
I was even more taken by the grotesque Weiwitschia mirabilis, with its two long, leathery, writhingly coiled leaves – it looked, to my eyes, like some strange vegetable octopus. Weiwitschia is not easy to grow outside its natural habitat in the Namibian desert, and the large specimen at Kew was one of the few which had been successfully cultivated, a very special treasure. (Joseph Hooker, who named it and obtained the original material from the euphonious Welwitsch, thought it the most interesting, though ugliest, plant ever brought into Britain; and Darwin, fascinated by its mixture of advanced and primitive characteristics, called it ‘the vegetable Ornithorhynchus,’ the platypus of the plant kingdom.)[79]
My aunt especially loved the smaller fern houses, the ferneries. We had ordinary ferns in our garden, but here, for the first time, I saw tree ferns, rearing themselves twenty or thirty feet up in the air, with lacy arching fronds at their summits, their trunks buttressed by thick cably roots – vigorous and alive, and yet hardly different from the ones of the Paleozoic.
And it was at Kew that I finally saw living cycads, clustered as they had been for a century or more in a corner of the great Palm House.[80] They too were survivors from a long-distant past, and the stamp of their ancientness was manifest in every part of them – in their huge cones, their sharp, spiny leaves, their heavy columnar trunks, reinforced like medieval armor, by persistent leaf bases. If the tree ferns had grace, these cycads had grandeur and, to my boyish mind, a sort of moral dimension too. Widespread once, reduced now to a few genera – I could not help thinking of them as both tragic and heroic. Tragic in that they had lost the premodern world they had grown up in: all the plants they were intimately related to – the seed ferns, the Bennettites, the Cordaites of the Paleozoic – had long ago vanished from the earth, and now they found themselves rare, odd, singular, anomalous, in a world of little, noisy, fast-moving animals and fast-growing, brightly colored flowers, out of synch with their own dignified and monumental timescale. But heroic too, in that they had survived the catastrophe which destroyed the dinosaurs, adapted to different climates and conditions (not least to the hegemony of birds and mammals, which the cycads now exploited to disperse their seeds).
The sense of their enduringness, their great phylogenetic age, was amplified for me by the age of some of the individual plants – one, an African Encephalartos longifolius, was said to be the oldest potted plant in Kew and had been brought here in 1775. If these wonders could be grown at Kew, I thought, why should I not grow them at home? When I was twelve (the war had just ended) I took the bus to a nursery in Edmonton, in north London, and bought two plants – a woolly tree fern, a Ci-botium, and a small cycad, a Zamia.[81] I tried to grow them in our little glassed-in conservatory at the back of the house – but the house was too cold, and they withered and died.
When I was older, and first visited Amsterdam, I discovered the beautiful little triangular Hortus Botanicus there – it was very old, and still had a medieval air, an echo of the herb gardens, the monastery gardens, from which botanical gardens had sprung. There was a conservatory which was particularly rich in cycads, including one ancient, gnarled specimen, contorted with age (or perhaps from its confinement in a pot and a small space), which was (also) said to be the oldest potted plant in the world. It was called the Spinoza cycad (though I have no idea whether Spinoza ever saw it), and it had been potted, if the information was reliable, near the middle of the seventeenth century; it vied, in this way, with the ancient cycad at Kew.[82]
But there is an infinite difference between a garden, however grand, and the wild, where one can get a feeling of the actual complexities and dynamics of life, the forces that press to evolution and extinction. And I yearned to see cycads in their own context, not planted, not labelled, not isolated for viewing, but growing side by side with banyans and screw pines and ferns all about them, the whole harmony and complexity of a full-scale cycad jungle – the living reality of my childhood dreamscape.
Rota is Guam’s closest companion in the Marianas chain and is geologically similar, with a complex history of risings and fallings, reef makings and destructions, going back forty million years or so. The two islands are inhabited by similar vegetation and animals – but Rota, lacking Guam’s size, its grand harbors, its commercial and agricultural potential, has been far less modernized. Rota has been largely left to itself, biologically and culturally, and it can perhaps give one some idea of how Guam looked in the sixteenth century, when it was still covered by dense forests of cycads, and this was why I wanted to come here.[83]
I would be meeting one of the island’s few remaining medicine women, Beata Mendiola – John Steele had known her, and her son Tommy, for many years. ‘They know more about cycads, about all the primitive plants and foods and natural medicines and poisons here,’ he said, ‘than anyone I know.’ They met me at the landing strip – Tommy is an engaging, intelligent man in his late twenties or early thirties, fluent in Chamorro and English. Beata, lean, dark, with an aura of power, was born during the Japanese occupation, and speaks Chamorro and Japanese only, so Tommy had to interpret for us.