Botany (with James Wong) - Part 1

James Wong:

Because humans co-evolved with plants for billions of years, long before we were actually modern humans, almost every thought we have, almost every part of our anatomy, almost every desire we have, whether we know it or not, has been shaped by this co-evolution.

Every major advance that we've made as humanity, we still rely on a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.

 

Rob Bell:

Now, you may have seen from the title of the podcast that this is part one of our botany episode with James Wong.

And if you'd like it so much that you want to just crack straight on with part two, then by all means, who am I to stop you?

But because we had so much fascinating content with James, we thought we'd give you the option to split it up into two listens.

Both part one and part two are available now, so it's up to you.

And whilst I'm here, I'll also remind you that Jono's book, Big Ideas, Little Pictures, with over 130 inspiring, funny, relatable sketches about life is out soon.

And you can head to sketchplanations.com to put your pre-order in now.

Okay, on with the show.

 

Hello and welcome to Sketchplanations, The Podcast.

 

You join us for this critical top of the table encounter as players on all sides emerge beneath me now into the floodlights from the depths of the tunnel that borrows from deep within this impressive stadium.

 

Recent performances on all sides have varied wildly in this mid-phase of the season in what can only be described as an orgy of Ws, Ds and Ls when comparing their latest form tables.

 

Will that affect the outcome of this meeting?

 

Only time will tell.

 

The man in the middle with the task of arbitrating this unmissable podcast appointment is me, Rob Bell.

 

Happy to be here.

 

Playing left to right in his traditional blue socks, blue shorts and yellow jersey, it's Sketchplanations United, Jono Hey.

 

And limbering up on the far side of the arena in his away colors of brown socks, pinstripe shorts and only recently approved by the governing body, that distinct floral patterned jersey, it's the old adversary, Tom Pellereau.

 

Good evening, gentlemen.

 

Are you well?

 

Jono Hey:

Yes, thank you.

 

Yeah, very good, thank you.

 

I never know what to expect.

 

Rob Bell:

Good.

 

Jono Hey:

I never know what to expect.

 

Keep me on my toes.

 

Tom Pellereau:

John Watson tonight.

 

Rob Bell:

That's just fun.

 

I'd say it's probably more an excuse just to do voices for me.

 

Tom Pellereau:

You've always been good at voices, to be fair.

 

Rob Bell:

I can do mine.

 

But kind of writing that led me into looking at British or maybe English football team name endings.

 

Give me an example and I'll tell you the origins of it.

 

Just name one.

 

Jono Hey:

Tottenham Hotspurs.

 

Rob Bell:

Hotspurs.

 

Jono Hey:

What is going on with that?

 

Rob Bell:

What is going on with Hotspurs?

 

Right, well, let me tell you.

 

Off the top of my head here.

 

So apparently named after Sir Harry Hotspur who featured in William Shakespeare's Henry IV.

 

A soldier, a fierce fighter.

 

So the London club adopted his name.

 

Oh come on, that must be rubbish.

 

Well, go on, give me another one.

 

Jono Hey:

Sheffield Wednesday.

 

Rob Bell:

Good one.

 

Jono Hey:

What are they Wednesdays?

 

What's going on?

 

Rob Bell:

So it's the only Wednesday in the league.

 

Quite simply, the name goes back to when it was originally a cricket club and they used to play their games on Wednesdays.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Is this just make it up with Rob tonight?

 

Rob Bell:

Yeah, do you know the most interesting fact I found out when looking at these is Rangers, Rovers and Wanderers, right?

 

Those three endings, there's a particular kind of meaning about those names, right?

 

Rangers, Rovers, Wanderers.

 

It comes from the fact that teams with those names originally didn't have a set home ground and that they'd range around, rove around, wander around different clubs or different pitches to play the fixtures.

 

How about that?

 

Jono Hey:

That is a good one.

 

Rob Bell:

That is a good one, isn't it?

 

Jono Hey:

What about Kid of Mr.

 

Harriers?

 

Were they harrying around?

 

I don't know.

 

Rob Bell:

Yeah, that might come from, Harriers is more of an athletics club and there are a few that come from athletics club names.

 

There was, where is it?

 

Where is it?

 

Where is it?

 

Athletic, Charlton, I think, probably comes from the fact that the club was born out of initially an athletics club.

 

Jono Hey:

We used to go to football games as a kid and I remember driving back in the dark after the games, because it was an evening game.

 

Actually, even if it was a-

 

Rob Bell:

In the winter.

 

Jono Hey:

Six o'clock in the winter and you're driving back and we'd put the radio on and he'd read out all the scores.

 

There was like the 530s doing all the scores of all the games across all of England, Scotland, Wales.

 

And it was amazing, like sort of fond memories of it, like a little tour of the British Isles, all these places that just like strand raw to Heart of Mithlothian 3.

 

And I'm like, I don't know where the heck these places are.

 

They sort of burned in my memories, these random places across the country.

 

Rob Bell:

I don't know if this score ever happened, but if it's just the myth, but they're two Scottish teams, East Fife and Forfar and the score East Fife 4, Forfar 5.

 

Jono Hey:

I didn't mean to say random.

 

They're obviously not the random places, but they're random in the sense that they just, I just, I know geography of the British Isles around it, who happens to play football and have a real side.

 

Tom Pellereau:

What I'm trying to work out is how Rob is going to link football to our conversation tonight.

 

Rob Bell:

Tom, there's always a way.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah, I know.

 

Rob Bell:

There's always a way.

 

Tom Pellereau:

That's what's also the next mystery.

 

Rob Bell:

Sometimes that way is, I don't, I don't link here, but can I tell you about an international, so a non-English or non-British, even it's Dutch team name, where that comes from, because it's quite a story.

 

And Tommy, you're going to love this.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Okay.

 

Rob Bell:

You might want to make notes.

 

Right, so there's a team in Holland called NAC Breda.

 

Okay, NAC Breda.

 

So the NAC in NAC Breda comes from an initialism, right?

 

NAC of Noad Advendo Combinati.

 

Right?

 

So that first word, Noad, that in itself is an acronym, right?

 

That stands for Noit Obhuden Altiege Dorsetsen.

 

Okay.

 

N-O-A-D, which means never quit, always persevere.

 

Okay.

 

So that's Noad for the N in NAC.

 

And Avendo is also an acronym that stands for Angenaam Doorvermacht en Nootig Door Otspanning, right?

 

And that is pleasant by enjoyment and useful by means of relaxation, translated.

 

Okay.

 

So Noad and Avendo were two football clubs in Breda in the Netherlands.

 

Okay.

 

And they merged in 1912 and that merging is represented by the last word in the NAC initialism.

 

The word starts with C, Combinazzi, Combine or United, if you like.

 

So all in, NAC Breda stands for never quit, always persevere, pleasant by enjoyment and useful by means of relaxation, United Breda.

 

You can see why they opted for NAC.

 

Jono Hey:

They really packed it in, it's a new way of like packing in loads of meaning into your words, isn't it?

 

Rob Bell:

Isn't that brilliant?

 

Tom Pellereau:

An acronym of an acronym of an acronym.

 

Rob Bell:

Where does it end?

 

It's isn't that brilliant and also isn't that silly?

 

Tom Pellereau:

It ends on a pitch in Breda.

 

Jono Hey:

It's quite fun to be a bit silly, isn't it?

 

Rob Bell:

And we thought Sketchplanations was a bit tricky.

 

Jono Hey:

Well, the S stands for...

 

Gosh, that would be something, wouldn't it?

 

Rob Bell:

Well, let me tell you, listeners, on this show, it matters not one bit which colours you wear, which club you follow or to be honest, whether you even like sport.

 

We're here for everyone.

 

Think of us as your generic activity, non-specific team united.

 

So come on team, let's podcast.

 

 

Rob Bell:

This week, we have another compilation of sketches to cover.

 

We're going to be talking all things botany.

 

So we're talking the scientific study of the physiology, the structure, genetics, distribution, classification, economic and societal importance of plants.

 

And who better to help us in this endeavor than someone who for the last couple of decades at least has immersed himself in the wonderful world of plants to the point where he quite happily now wears the moniker Botany Geek.

 

It's James Wong.

 

Now, whether you know James as the youngest ever RHS medal winner at the Hampton Court Palace Show, as a two-time gold medal winner at the world famous Chelsea Flower Show, as the author of six bestselling books for his numerous TV series on the BBC, Channel News Asia and Netflix, through his regular contributions to Gardener's Question Time on Radio 4, or in his capacity as an ambassador for Kew Gardens, there's absolutely no question that this chap knows his onions, pun totally intended.

 

James, hello, welcome to the podcast.

 

James Wong:

Oh my goodness, what an intro.

 

You've just given me all the validation my Asian parents never gave me.

 

Ha ha ha ha.

 

Ha ha ha ha.

 

Rob Bell:

Ha ha ha ha.

 

Jono Hey:

You can play it for them.

 

James Wong:

I definitely, I'm going to have to print that out, frame it and stick it in the family loo.

 

Rob Bell:

Ah, James, thank you so much for coming on.

 

You and I have met a number of times over the years, but we haven't seen each other for a little while.

 

And it's very good to see you.

 

And we've never really talked botany.

 

James Wong:

We haven't actually.

 

Yeah, it's usually what?

 

Beer, conversations, world of media.

 

We went to the same uni as well.

 

So like Bath space stuff randomly, and we didn't know each other at uni, but now we do.

 

Everything but plants.

 

Rob Bell:

Tom and Jono both went to Bath as well.

 

That's how I know them.

 

We are all Bath alumni.

 

James Wong:

That's so weird.

 

Rob Bell:

How cool is that?

 

We're all there at the same time.

 

James Wong:

I probably stumbled into you and spilled a drink at some point in the Bath.

 

Rob Bell:

Exactly.

 

James Wong:

In the plug.

 

Rob Bell:

In the plug.

 

James Wong:

That's it, yeah.

 

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

 

And the venue.

 

Oh man, great days.

 

Anyway, we could really go down a rabbit hole with that one.

 

James Wong:

Oh, going down a geriatric millennial plug hole.

 

It's not good.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah.

 

Although thinking about those buildings, they could have done with your help.

 

True.

 

James Wong:

Absolutely right.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Oh my gosh, they could have been improved significantly.

 

Rob Bell:

It's a bit of a concrete jungle.

 

James Wong:

Such a brutal and amazing architecture that would be so cool if it was then draped in plants, just like that.

 

Rob Bell:

Right.

 

Well, we know what we're doing after this.

 

We can all write our emails to the new vice chancellor.

 

James, I mentioned onions in my introduction there.

 

Anything interesting you know about onions?

 

James Wong:

Oh, that's a good question.

 

Talk about a pop quiz.

 

Okay, well, there's lots of different fascinating things about onions.

 

So, for example, the reason why they make you cry is because of sulphuric acid.

 

There are sulfur-based compounds in onions that are held in two different parts of the cell and when you break them open, you're creating damage and these two chemicals mix together, they're toxic even to onions.

 

So they never make these sulfur-based compounds unless there's damage.

 

They waft into the air, they mix with the water in your eye, creating sulfuric acid.

 

Plants can't run away or hide from environmental threats like animals can, so they've had to develop all these amazing, absolutely nuts chemical weapons.

 

That's where there's such a great source of things that taste good or things that could potentially cure you or things that could make your eyes sting.

 

So yeah, there's lots of other weird stuff about onions, but that's the first thing that came to mind.

 

Rob Bell:

James, we are so happy.

 

We're all sitting here so happy.

 

This is gonna be a good podcast.

 

Jono Hey:

This is way better than Rob ever expected.

 

Rob Bell:

Now James, I think I'm right in saying botany is the science of plants and plant life in kind of in the widest possible sense, right?

 

It incorporates all those things I was talking about earlier, you know, the classification, the physiology that you've just talked us through some of there and even into the kind of societal importance of plants.

 

I mean, is it, amongst all of that, are there any particular areas of botany that you've focused on and that you're most interested in?

 

James Wong:

Yeah, so my research area is specifically ethnobotany, and I'm forever having to explain that.

 

It sounds technical and complex, but it really isn't.

 

I describe us ethnobotanists as the only botanists that have to have some level of social skill.

 

I'm not saying a lot, but we have some, because we're not necessarily the kind of people that look at how the apparatus works inside cells.

 

We're not the people who figure out how plants are related to each other on the family tree using DNA sequencing.

 

We're a little bit less technical than that.

 

And what we do is we look at human use of plants.

 

So where the world of humans and the world of plants comes together.

 

And in one sense, it's a really niche subset of botany and also a niche subset of anthropology.

 

But in the other sense, it's pretty much everything we do.

 

The whole of civilization is based on plants, whether that's for food or medicine or the air we breathe.

 

Because humans co-evolves with plants for billions of years, like long before we were actually modern humans, almost every thought we have, almost every part of our anatomy, almost every desire we have, whether we know it or not, has been shaped by this co-evolution.

 

Rob Bell:

Amazing, wow, yeah.

 

James Wong:

People dismiss plants, right?

 

So I often, so if I'm in like a get a cab or I'm making small talk with someone in the pub, the few times I have to have human interaction.

 

The first thing that people find out when I'm at the bar, is they say, oh, so you know, how do they adept them?

 

Or, basically they think of garden makeovers.

 

They think of plants as ornamental objects.

 

And that is a valid use of plants.

 

We have loads of great evidence that being around a beautiful environment actually can do things like improve our mental health, measurably reduce stress levels and blood pressure and reduce crime rates and stuff like that.

 

So there is an aesthetic aspect, which isn't entirely frivolous, but I mean, plants are at least part of the solution to every major problem that faces our species.

 

You know, climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, like every major advance that we've made as humanity, despite all of those, we still rely on a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains and the plants that grow in them.

 

Rob Bell:

What an amazing perspective, James.

 

What a really refreshing perspective to come at things from.

 

Yeah, wow.

 

James Wong:

Oh, well, I mean, I think that's the, I think everyone else is weird.

 

When they talk about, you know, flower arranging, I'm like, I literally have no idea.

 

I have no idea how to do any of that stuff.

 

But that's what people on the outside think.

 

So it's fascinating, right, in the different disciplines, what people outside of the industry think and what you who does that every day thinks.

 

Rob Bell:

And you're talking about all the different facets and you listed some there, but in your book and in the BBC series that you've done, Grow Your Own Drugs, you're looking specifically at the potential of plants to help treat the human body.

 

How important has that science been for the goodness of humankind?

 

James Wong:

There is an idea, and it's a very cultural idea, and this is why, as an anthropologist, I find culture and the cultural ideas about plants fascinating.

 

The plant-based medicine is historic, doesn't necessarily work, it's perhaps quite safe, but doesn't have any efficacy.

 

And then on the reverse side of this polarity, you have modern medicine, which is synthetic and evidence-based and perhaps may have lots of side effects.

 

In reality, that's a cultural construct.

 

The big black line that divides those two things is entirely a figment of our imaginations.

 

So roughly 50% of the world's most commonly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs, the stuff you get on the NHS, the stuff you get from the chemist, were originally derived from the natural world or are still derived from the natural world.

 

And there's a good reason for that, right?

 

So if you're trying to find, if you're trying to prospect as a species, chemicals that will do something to your body, that are biologically active, that can alter your biology in some way, plants are a really good place to find that because for billions of years, they've been fighting with their environment using chemical weapons.

 

And they've been consistently needing for their own survival to come up with solutions.

 

So everything from aspirin, pedosilic, it comes from a mold, but it's still from the natural world.

 

The leading anti-malarial drugs are still produced from plants.

 

I think something really high, like 20% of the leading cancer drugs, things like Pakletaxel, which comes from yew trees, are isolated from plants.

 

Almost all of the pain medication is either based on plants or based on chemicals that are copies of chemicals or first identified in plants.

 

You know, if you have a medicine cabinet at home, it's really likely that there's lots of plants in there, just not packaged.

 

You know, they don't look like leaves.

 

They look like pills, but the compounds found their way into medicine through the world of botany.

 

Rob Bell:

Yeah, crikey.

 

James, before we get into the sketches, I feel like it would be great for our listeners and for us to understand, what is it about plants that first grabbed your attention?

 

How is it that you discovered this love of plants and plant life?

 

James Wong:

Juno, that's the hardest question.

 

I've had it a few times, so I have a prepared answer.

 

Rob Bell:

Well, give us your prepared answer and we can probe.

 

James Wong:

Okay, so I can tell you, so I used to think, particularly when I was in my 20s, when people would ask me that, they would always ask me it with their head tilted to the side.

 

So it was like, oh, did you have a really inspirational teacher?

 

Or does it run in your family?

 

Tilting my head to the side for people who can't see me, obviously, on a podcast.

 

And what makes you so interested in plants?

 

And I used to think, well, I've got to come up with something.

 

Well, I guess I grew up in the tropics and to be interested in something, you have to have exposure to it.

 

And in the tropics, you're physically around growing plants a lot more because in the UK, plants only really grow for half the year.

 

So the active growing period of some plants can be as little as six weeks.

 

For the rest of the year, they're not doing it.

 

And maybe also because I grew up in the tropics, it was in Malaysia where people use plants for things.

 

So I was never brought up in a cultural context where plants were just go to the garden center and pick plants off shelves as if you're picking like soft furnishings.

 

I was introduced to them as this will sort out your headache.

 

Oh, let's get this for lunch today.

 

Or, you know, it's raining, I'll rip off that palm leaf, two seconds of origami, you've got a hat.

 

That's how I saw plants as solutions to things.

 

And I used to genuinely think, because I had to search to justify my weird interests, that that was the case.

 

And then I was like, you know what?

 

In my Catholic Malaysian family, I have like 5,000 cousins, literally zero of them are interested in plants, like identical upbringing.

 

And I said to my brother, who's like obsessed with football, Paul, has anyone ever said to you, so tell me about this interest in football?

 

When did that start?

 

Does it run in your family?

 

Or did you have a really inspirational teacher at school?

 

No, it's because people assume that football is interesting, James.

 

And I often think that in the UK, we're acculturated into thinking that plants are not interesting.

 

And therefore, it's a surprise that people are interested in them.

 

And you've got to figure out what weird stuff happened in their childhood to make them interested.

 

Sorry, this is a very long answer.

 

To me, I think it's weird that people aren't interested in plants.

 

What's wrong with everyone?

 

They're literally the most fascinating thing possible, and they surround us at all times.

 

Rob Bell:

But James, and so James, I think as three engineers here, we could probably give very similar answers about engineering, how we're amazed that people don't find engineering interesting and that they're turned off at the thought of it and much would rather go and watch or learn about something else.

 

But then if you get the opportunity to spend two, three minutes with them and tell them an interesting fact, like you brought us all in with the chemical warfare of onions when we slice into it, suddenly people are like, oh, maybe it's not such a dull subject after all, or maybe there is something to this.

 

James Wong:

Engineering is, I mean, actually engineering a plant is a massive crossover, but it's figuring out the, DNA is not quite the right word, but it's figuring out the blueprint of how everything works.

 

And the things that people take for granted in everyday life and the miracles that it's afforded us.

 

There's a lot of similar crossover.

 

Tom Pellereau:

I find it fascinating to my parents, obviously in their 60s, 70s now, they spend all their time in the garden.

 

And my grandparents as well.

 

And it seems that we reach a stage of life where we just become so, so fascinated by the garden and growing plants and potatoes.

 

And my kids love going to see my parents because they, you know, they're pulling potatoes out of the ground, they're picking raspberries, they're picking strawberries, all these sort of things which they love.

 

But it seems in this middle part of life, culturally, as it seems absolutely right, that we kind of just, that doesn't happen and we come back to it in later life, which is very interesting.

 

James Wong:

Yeah, I've often wondered why that's the case, because, you know, very often I'll hear, you know, we did this thing to try and get kids interested in plants and we sowed some seeds and they were fascinated.

 

And I was like, yeah, no, it's a miracle of life, falling in front of them, which it's objectively fascinating.

 

Like, if you were to do that with a phone and they were to sprout legs and walk across the room, like it would be amazing.

 

So there's something that happens.

 

And I think, I don't know whether it's because of gardening, I mean, particularly if you're from the UK, the role that gardening has in UK culture, is it considered something that posh people do?

 

Is it considered that there are lots of rules and lots of gatekeepers and knowing exactly how to do it and in what way?

 

Is it considered that like, if you don't do it right, you don't get the Latin right, everything's going to fail?

 

I wonder whether you kind of, you know, when you're a child, you're just seeing the miracles.

 

When someone starts throwing lots of Latin and, oh, actually, I think you'll find it's pronounced Calisterman, I think that really puts you off.

 

When I was learning about plants and biology in school, I saw the photosynthesis diagram up on the wall.

 

When I learned about animals and zoology, it was David Attenborough, you know, showing like a drama unfolding in a surrogate.

 

And maybe it's the way we talk about plants, particularly in the UK that can kind of make people feel like they're not allowed.

 

Maybe just young people and old people just don't care that much about worrying about that, and they can just get involved in it.

 

Jono Hey:

We've planted some seeds recently, some little grass seeds, and they're in the soil, and we happened to put them in a plastic container just because we needed a container just like for the recycling, like a raspberry container.

 

They've just been growing on the dining room table recently, and it was brilliant.

 

You couldn't see anything, but then if you turned it upside down, actually the seeds have been really busy underneath and created all these roots around the bottom of the thing.

 

Then you see the first ones the next day poking above the soil, and now they've grown about a centimeter or two a day.

 

I come back from work, and they've grown a centimeter or two.

 

It's just every time I come and sit down at dinner, it's like, what have they done?

 

What have they done now?

 

It's amazing.

 

James Wong:

To me, it's like that Christmas morning feeling, or that tooth fairy feeling.

 

You know, you don't get to have that.

 

You only get to do the Christmas morning feeling like six times in your life before someone ruins it, and you eventually think about, you know, I hope no kids are listening, the reality of what happens.

 

You don't get that magic.

 

With Caesar, it happens every time.

 

Like every time, you know, you can look at something, and it seems to have spontaneously done something amazing.

 

What I find, though, in horticulture, I was once told off by some very big-wit people in horticulture, because I used the word, and I did a talk at, I think, Chelsea Glow Show, and I talked about gardening being exciting.

 

And they said, that's not the right word.

 

That is not what gardening is.

 

Gardening is absorbing.

 

This is all a kind of Americanization of the world.

 

And I went, you know what?

 

If you haven't sown seeds and you no longer find it exciting and you don't think that's the right word, then you...

 

I can never stop finding it exciting.

 

And I think if we maybe talked about plants in a different way, we would allow people to feel that.

 

I mean, because you've all just described personal experiences feeling that.

 

And yet how...

 

And it's built into our DNA to find them exciting.

 

There are so many...

 

I mean, I could bore you to death with all the reasons why we are genetically and instinctually programmed to find plants fascinating.

 

And yet somehow culturally, we've been put up there.

 

Tom Pellereau:

And I must say, looking at your Instagram, your aquascapes and your mini ferns, that just the way that you make them in these sort of mini worlds is so exciting to me, looking at those and the way you're pulled into those.

 

James Wong:

I think there has become a big interest, particularly lockdown adjacent, in growing plants indoors for people who previously would never do it.

 

And I definitely feel that there is something about...

 

One thing is the miracle of the natural world.

 

But you can observe...

 

When you go on a walk around a forest, I think everyone knows that they feel better, right?

 

You can feel the fresh air, you're maybe not looking at your phone for five minutes, you can see things unfolding in front of you.

 

But you're witnessing the natural world in quite a passive way.

 

And there is loads of really good evidence to suggest that even looking at the natural world on a screen can actually improve, can actually have lots of measurable health benefits.

 

When you're gardening, you're doing something quite different.

 

You're not just witnessing that in a passive way, you're actually having a hand in shaping it.

 

I often think it's like the difference between dreaming and watching a film.

 

When you watch a film, you're just watching someone else's reality.

 

When you're in a dream, there is something quite cinematic about it, except you're starring in the film and directing it and creating the atmosphere that you're viewing at the same time.

 

That's the difference between horticulture and just regular nature.

 

You actually get to play a hand.

 

You get to be in the orchestra of nature.

 

That, to me, is what's so exciting about it.

 

Trying to create those miniature worlds at home is, when it's raining on a February night at 10 o'clock and I'm not hanging out with you guys, I can do that.

 

Rob Bell:

James, I'm going to suggest that we move on into our sketches.

 

It is brilliant and I will unapologetically use the word exciting to have you with us here for the episode.

 

Now, I think you're aware of the podcast format.

 

Jono, creator of Sketchplanations, has a bulging collection of sketches on all sorts of things.

 

James Wong:

You're really good at these.

 

Jono Hey:

It's very good.

 

James Wong:

They're amazing.

 

Rob Bell:

Each week we pick one or some, as is the case tonight, and we talk about them in more detail.

 

I was going through the collection and Jono has a good dozen or so, probably more, sketches related to botany.

 

But together we've selected five, or a handful, should we say, that we'll go through with you and get your expert input on.

 

So, dear listeners, I will select a headline sketch and I'll use that as the artwork for this episode, which you'll hope you'll be able to see up on your screens now in front of you.

 

And then I'll include links to all the other sketches that we talk about in the podcast description down below, so you can click on to those links straight through to all the other sketches.

 

And as we go through, if there's anything we discussed that you, our listeners, would like to comment on, or if you'd like to tell us something from your own botanical biographies, then you can email us at hello, I always do that.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Email us on hello at sketchplanations.com.

 

Rob Bell:

Thank you, Tommy.

 

Or you can leave us a comment on social media, whatever works for you.

 

And we'll be going through last week's correspondence at the very end of the show.

 

Finally, if you'd like to watch this podcast, you can find us up on YouTube.

 

Right, enough admin.

 

Let's talk plants.

 

So the first sketch we're going to discuss is Heat Island.

 

So Jono, I'm going to suggest we come to you first to hear about your understanding of what Heat Island is and what inspired you to do this sketch.

 

And then we'll hear from James about how and why plant life and greenery can help mitigate the effects of Heat Island.

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah.

 

Well, I'll just give a briefing and we can turn over some of the thoughts.

 

But we live in southwest London.

 

And one of the reasons I love living in southwest London and actually London in general, I think London is the most parked city, as in there are the most parks for the area of the city.

 

And southwest London has a lot, including lovely places like Richmond Park and greenery along the Thames River and so on.

 

And I'm also just really conscious of how, if you look at maps of the UK, where the hot parts are when you get those sort of heat waves.

 

And, you know, I love having trees around and it just makes such a difference, like even in our garden, having some trees at the back where you could sit under the shade in the summer or you could sit on the grass.

 

And it's so different when you get a real heat wave from feeling like the heat of a pavement or the road or a playground even without all of that greenery.

 

And so heat islands, I think, is just a really, it's a metaphor, right?

 

But like you actually, you see it if you look at a map.

 

And I actually, Royal Parks sent me a really nice heat map of London and all of the blue spots, the not red really hot spots, are the parks, the park spaces.

 

And I just think it's so important as we're building out, more people are moving into cities that we make the most of the greenery that we have.

 

And actually it makes a much more liveable area.

 

Anyway, so I really like this idea of heat islands and looking into it.

 

There are a number of reasons why urban areas retain and feel much hotter than more natural areas with more greenery.

 

But that's what I was trying to share.

 

So that's what the sketch does on one side, that you have the urban area and the other side, you have the area with more greenery and it picks out some of the factors that make that happen.

 

Rob Bell:

So should we talk about why it's important to have green areas in a city to mitigate that heat?

 

I mean, so with all the built environments, you've got that thermal mass, right?

 

That's the engineering term if you want to talk about it.

 

Structurally, there's this thermal mass that will retain that heat.

 

That's what we're talking about, isn't it?

 

There's heat coming out not just from the sky above, but it's coming out from almost all around you, 360 degrees.

 

Jono Hey:

There's a number of things.

 

So all of our building materials absorb the heat.

 

And so one of the big differences is they don't cool down so much at night.

 

So in areas with more greenery, you get that cool of the evening.

 

And if you have more urban areas, your buildings warm up during the day, and then they radiate that still at night.

 

So you don't get that break.

 

And then you have other things.

 

You have cars running.

 

You have people cooking.

 

You have, of course, fires, machinery, that kind of thing, air conditioning.

 

The hotter it gets, the more people are running air conditioners.

 

You also have things like the shapes of the building.

 

So you don't get that sort of breeze pushing the air away.

 

But if you go to the coast, you've got a breeze on you all the time.

 

So it might be hot, but it feels much, much cooler.

 

And so there's a number of reasons.

 

It's not just the mass of the buildings absorbing it, but it's other things as well.

 

Rob Bell:

So James, what was it about the Heat Island Sketch that caught your interest?

 

James Wong:

The amazing thing if you're a plant person is, I think to a lot of other people, plants are just like this.

 

People call them developers parsley.

 

It's just green stuff that's around.

 

If you're botany literate, you can actually tell that London is way warmer, even just from photographs from the rest of the UK.

 

So for example, there are avocado trees all over London, and I think this must have come up.

 

They're never in posh people's houses, and I guess that's because posh people's houses who have big gardens probably know the rules of gardening.

 

You often see them in council estates, like the one I was born in North London, there's a bunch around there.

 

They're usually in council blocks with tiny outdoor green spaces, and some of them, full fruit, 20 even 30 meters tall, there was a craze in the 70s for planting them, like you would do with onions.

 

You put three toothpicks and you stick them on a glass of water, and they root down the bottom.

 

People must have had those, had them as houseplants, and not knowing that, oh, London isn't tropical, and avocados shouldn't be allowed to grow outdoors.

 

They've just shoved them outdoors.

 

And the most amazing thing is avocados are daishas, so you need a male and a female to produce fruit.

 

So when you see fruiting trees around, there's obviously enough other avocados that you're not seeing to have the males to create those fruits.

 

So essentially London, temperature-wise, when you look at the planting, it's almost like, well, it's probably 500, 1,000 miles further north than the temperature would suggest.

 

It's almost like another Canary Island, just stuck in the middle of a much colder North Atlantic island.

 

It's really different, at least five degrees warmer.

 

And you can see that in the plants.

 

Grapefruit trees, the world's most northerly grapefruit tree, there's a few of them.

 

There's one in Chelsea Physic Garden, but there's a few around.

 

Date palms, there's really a big difference.

 

Rob Bell:

Which kind of, if you look at where we are on the planet from a climate perspective, you would not expect those plants to survive.

 

That's the point, right?

 

But London's Heat Island allows them to survive, thrive perhaps even.

 

James Wong:

Absolutely.

 

Yeah, some of them, you know, the fact that they're fruiting so readily is a sign that they're really happy.

 

So, you know, there are some opportunities when it comes to urban heat island, right?

 

Like if you're an exotic plant lover and you live in London.

 

But if you look at other cities around the world, for example, Singapore, where I grew up, you know, bang on the equator, it's unbelievably hot every day of the year.

 

Since I was a kid, I go back and I'm astonished about the heat difference.

 

I don't like to think I'm that old.

 

But, you know, in 20 years of not living there, the airport sliding doors open and you're just hit by a blast of heat.

 

And that has caused the government there to become really concerned about the future survivability, the future habitability of cities like that, where there's such a high density of glass, steel and chrome.

 

And one of the really cost effective ways to help mitigate that is plants.

 

So the reason why parks help is partially just because they're not asphalt and concrete, just because of what they're not, it helps.

 

But another part of that is that plants create shade and they also transpire.

 

So they're constantly, they have these tiny little pores on the underside of most plants leaves called stomata.

 

They're what they breathe through.

 

And they breathe, they release water out of those.

 

So they're constantly evaporating off and giving off water vapor.

 

And that acts like a cooling system.

 

So the government of Singapore has mandated that every new building has to be covered in at least as much greenery as the plot of land that the building sits on.

 

So you have two acres of plot site, there has to be two acres of greenery surrounding that building.

 

And it's sort of weirdly started out a bit of an arms race with different, like each hotel or each new development will sell itself on the basis of how much green space it has wrapping the building.

 

And what they've found is that in some instances, the surface of these buildings can have almost a 50 degree difference in temperature.

 

So Singapore might be 30 degrees.

 

On the windows of a glass and steel building in a really, really high area, that creates an astonishing amount of heat that's bounced off different glass panels, reflected off metal and then absorbed into the structure.

 

And then of course the building itself, to be livable inside, has to pay money to cool that building down to a more livable 20 degrees on the inside.

 

So it's not just about survivability on a street level.

 

It has an economic impact to the people who run buildings.

 

And when you cover them in plants, not only because the shading of the plant on the building is interior, but also the water vapour that's constantly being kicked out, it's a natural cooling system.

 

You don't really have to pay, I mean, you have to pay for maintenance, but you don't have to pay that much maintenance, but it's self-healing.

 

You know, if a bit rips off, plants grow.

 

If it was a new polymer that was created, that was probably quite expensive and it was installed and broke off or snapped, you would have to get someone up on ropes to reinstall that.

 

Plants fix themselves.

 

So there's been a lot of work around the world, but particularly in tropical cities to try and address that.

 

And not because green stuff looks nice, which it does, but because it's practical.

 

Rob Bell:

I mean, green roofs is typically, you know, you hear a lot about green roofs, but we're talking more about up the sides as well now.

 

And I've seen quite a lot on your social media post, James, of buildings that you featured with greenery growing up the outside.

 

And I think it looks absolutely fantastic.

 

It strikes me that it's either really modern buildings or really, really old abandoned buildings where you see them covered in greenery.

 

James Wong:

I think it's really fascinating because it's an idea that was created in the UK.

 

It was pioneered in the UK as was the whole garden city concept of planting lots and lots of trees and parks within cities.

 

In the 1930s, there was a similar arms race to cover buildings in green in places like London.

 

So Selfridges had a huge roof garden, as did quite a few of the other contemporary department stores.

 

And when this was done, it wasn't done because people thought it necessarily looked nice.

 

It was done because it was an excuse to draw visitors in.

 

You know, like when you leave a visitor attraction, you go through the gift shop.

 

Basically, people would go to these free places to see greenery in a choked, crowded, polluted city, and then be forced to walk through the shop all the way up and all the way down.

 

And it was kind of a standard idea.

 

And I just kind of think that just after the war, I think we forgot about it.

 

And it wasn't picked up until, you know, the 60s when it started out in Singapore again.

 

So it is a kind of a shame that we think about as quite a modern concept, but it really starts in the early 20th century and just got abandoned.

 

Yeah, just imagine what London could look like if I had carried on.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Well, exactly.

 

It's kind of really exciting.

 

A friend of mine is in Singapore this week, and he was sending back photos and then looking at your social media of that car park all covered in the incredible variety of plants.

 

And you just think London is a really green city in terms of its parks, but the future of it is incredible in terms of how much more there could be all over our beautiful buildings and how green and lush it will become.

 

And probably all the cities in the world will gradually become.

 

And then they'll be cooler.

 

They'll be much nicer to look at and probably much nicer to live in as well.

 

So it's really quite exciting how these cities are gonna change over the next 10, 20 years.

 

Rob Bell:

I read a 2015 study from the Barcelona Institute of Global Health talking about tree cover in European cities and how by doubling the amount of tree cover could help reduce heat related deaths by up to 40%.

 

James Wong:

I mean, that's astonishing, right?

 

Especially given climate change is projected to show a dramatic increase in that.

 

I think the problem is, I've always thought, plants look a bit too nice.

 

And it's quite difficult to picture them as being practical objects in the same way that microchips and oil is.

 

It's quite difficult to sell them because they can be expensive to maintain.

 

So to cover a building in plants isn't hugely expensive, but it's more of a cost than not doing it.

 

People have previously thought, well, it's a frivolous developers parsley addition on the outside.

 

If we can make the case, which botanists have always known, I guess we just don't like talking to people.

 

If we can make the case that you would save money on your heating, you would produce less carbon emissions, you would get better productivity in the workplace, people would feel less stressed when they do that.

 

We now know that even in a gym, if you show artificial screens of views of the natural world, there's not actually any plant material in that gym, people will exercise for longer and yet perceive it to be easier.

 

And we have similar data in offices to show productivity.

 

If you can make the economic case and the economic case is there, we have a growing body of really solid data.

 

I think the world would change for the better.

 

Rob Bell:

I love it.

 

Listen, I'm going to move us along, but I'm considering painting the outside of my house because it's got horrible pebble dash on it, but now you've just given me another idea for it.

 

So I'm going to look into that as well.

 

James Wong:

It also shows that it protects the walls of your building.

 

Sorry, too many facts.

 

Ivy was often previously thought that it would actually destroy mortar and ruin the outside of your house.

 

Rob Bell:

So let's not move on quite yet, because this was in my mind when you were talking about that, that often we see plants growing up and Ivy is a particular one.

 

You're like, right, get that off because it's going to get right in there, it's going to pull the mortar out and it's going to ruin the structural integrity of the building.

 

James Wong:

Yeah, it's a very plausible belief and it's also very widespread, but evidence and according to many really rigorous trials has shown that it's not the case.

 

In fact, if you have sound brickwork to start with, if you've got brickwork that's falling apart, adding weight to that may cause an issue, but if everything is fine, rough working order, the exact opposite is the case.

 

So Ivy, particularly evergreen climbing plants like Ivy, they shade the surface of the building and that prevents not only the interior of the building heating up or cooling down too rapidly, it insulates the building.

 

It prevents cracking from happening because you're essentially creating a protective skin that keeps rain off.

 

It also is kept dry by the roots that are constantly on there.

 

So it cools the building in summer.

 

It helps retain its heat in winter.

 

It holds the mortar in place.

 

It's kind of like a no-brainer.

 

Ivy can grow from a cutting in a glass of water.

 

It would take a while to cover your building.

 

However, if you were to try and create a protective mesh that did that, it probably wouldn't look as good as ivy and probably be a lot more expensive to cover your house.

 

Rob Bell:

There are literally no downsides.

 

I will pass your contact details of trust to my insurers, just in case though, James.

 

James Wong:

Insurers haven't caught on to it, but there's great stuff at University of Reading and Royal Horticultural Society, just in case you think I'm making it up.

 

Go on to Google.

 

Rob Bell:

I never think you're making anything up, James.

 

James Wong:

The good thing with Francis people know so little that you probably could make it up.

 

I promise you I'm not.

 

Rob Bell:

Okay, let's move on.

 

The second sketch we're going to talk about was the Browse Line.

 

Now Jono, you first told me about the Browse Line when we were running in Richmond Park once and you pointed it out.

 

So come on, tell us what is the Browse Line, Jono.

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah, it's a really simple thing.

 

It's funny, I saw it called this distinctively in the Nature documentary and then I was like, oh, that's what we've been seeing all this time.

 

That is the name for this, which is nice.

 

And so it's essentially a line that you get, and this is what's in the sketch, where a tree has been growing and then you have ground animals like deer and they're grazing the ground, but they're also eating the leaves from the trees.

 

And so they reach up and they eat the leaves from the trees as high as they can reach.

 

And what happens is you end up with trees with a very distinct flat line at the bottom of their canopy, which is exactly like as grazed perfectly to that height by the maximum height of deer standing on their tiptoes, for example.

 

And so you get a really distinctive browse line.

 

I'm sure they're different if you have different animals in different places, but I was like, that's what I've been seeing.

 

That's why you have these trees which are all irregular in different shapes as they go up, but almost like a perfectly straight line underneath that you can walk underneath.

 

And that's just the height of the deer.

 

So it's called a browse line.

 

Rob Bell:

And that begs the question, Jono, about depending on which creatures, and I think you mentioned this in the caption on your sketch, what about where you've got giraffes?

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah, giraffes and elephants actually, to be fair as well, which will just go straight through the tree.

 

James Wong:

The answer is you also have a browse line.

 

It's just a much higher browse line.

 

Rob Bell:

That makes sense.

 

It's logical.

 

It's logical, James.

 

James Wong:

When you see those flat acacia trees, they're like the typical ones when you see, like, at the beginning of The Lion King.

 

Rob Bell:

Oh, yeah.

 

James Wong:

You know, or in any nature documentary.

 

Partially, like, the top is flat just because that's a plant, but the bottom is so kind of geometrically perfect because it's a much higher browse line.

 

And the weird thing is that plants actually react to that to create another layer of browse line, which you may or may not have noticed.

 

So holly is a classic example of something called heterophily.

 

So the spiky leaves of holly are, the spikes are not there for no reason.

 

They're there to defend against herbivore attack.

 

If you've ever been up in a building or, you know, gone up on a ladder or something and looked at the top of a holly tree, any higher than about two meters, they don't have thoughts.

 

They don't bother making thorns because it's quite metabolically expensive for the plant to make thorns.

 

It only makes them below the browse line.

 

At a certain point, it just doesn't bother.

 

And we once wondered why lots of plants from places like New Zealand have this thing called heterophily.

 

So they come out the ground looking kind of brown and spiky and often look a bit dead.

 

If you're not familiar with the plant, it just looks like it's been burned.

 

You know, the brown leaves face downwards, they're really thick.

 

They don't even look like leaves.

 

They almost look like wire, like cables.

 

And then suddenly they get to above about three or four meters and they explode out with this completely different foliage that is unrecognizable to the previous one.

 

Lush, green, fluffy, soft, lettuce-like, delicious looking.

 

And we wondered for a long while why they were doing this.

 

And it turns out there's an extinct bird in New Zealand called the moa.

 

And it's a giant flightless bird, a little bit bigger than a modern day ostrich.

 

They became extinct, I think, in the 1700s.

 

And basically it's defense against moas.

 

Once you've got above the height of a moa, which I think is a little, probably would have been a little bit smaller than a giraffe, a bit higher than an ostrich, that's what happens.

 

So these plants that like you would never imagine that it's the same plant, sometimes when you see them in the transition stage, you're like, it looks like a Dr.

 

Seuss, people have taken a bunch of plant cuttings and stuck them together, like franken plant.

 

And that's why, it's heterophily and it's created because of browse wine.

 

Rob Bell:

I mean, we're talking about, I guess, evolution here.

 

How long might it take a plant to realize that that species doesn't exist anymore and it doesn't need this defense?

 

James Wong:

Yeah.

 

Well, I'm imagining that some of the plants, because what we're looking at is the plants of today.

 

They went extinct long enough ago for there to be plants from when the mowers, like larger trees, from when the mowers still existed.

 

I've not read a study on this, but I imagine if you compared some of the newer, like younger plants, like recently sown plants to ones that are several hundred years old, you may be able to see a difference.

 

The natural world does adapt really quickly without that environmental pressure.

 

I mean, to be able to, creating these thick, chunky leaves is metabolically expensive.

 

They're wasting energy now doing that because there's no pressure.

 

Unless, of course, something fills that gap.

 

And if, like, sheep are doing a similar thing, then they may still do heterophilia, but to a different browse line height.

 

They may only start kicking them out at a shorter height.

 

Rob Bell:

Amazing.

 

Is it only creatures within the habitat that would affect a browse line?

 

Would there be anything else, I don't know, chemically or within the plant world that might affect a browse line?

 

James Wong:

Plants have lots of senses that are akin to human senses, but they just detect them in different ways.

 

So plants obviously don't have eyes, but they can see in inverted commas.

 

So they can detect light that's around them and they can detect light bouncing off other plants.

 

You can definitely do things like, you can trick, if you have tomato plants or strawberry plants, you can make their fruit taste better by tricking them into thinking that there are competing plants around them.

 

So if you put up reflective materials in the right color green or the right color red, because weirdly one of the light spectrums that reflect our plants is red, the plants react thinking that there's competition around them and they shove more sugars on their fruits.

 

So one of the agricultural techniques to make things taste better without any chemicals is basically to create reflectors of different colored lights.

 

So it could be, I guess that's the sort of a browse line competing plants, them detecting it and not wanting to go there, just without browsing.

 

Jono Hey:

Love that connection.

 

There's those brilliant things for sketches.

 

I'm like, people need to know this stuff.

 

James Wong:

It's great, brilliant.

 

Tom Pellereau:

The natural world is so smart.

 

None of us realize just how incredibly intelligent and advanced these sort of dumb plants around us are.

 

James Wong:

I think people think of plants as passive.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah.

 

James Wong:

And just because they don't act.

 

You know, I've often thought, right, when you watch like a Hollywood movie and they meet alien life, if we were to meet alien life, we probably wouldn't know that it was intelligent.

 

Because statistically, it would probably look so different from us, we couldn't possibly ever picture that it was intelligent.

 

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

 

James Wong:

Because we think of it as intelligence in the way that we perform.

 

And it is quite controversial to call plants intelligent, particularly in Botany land.

 

But what I would say is that we do know that plants are capable of learning, they're capable of absorbing really quite complex information from the world around them, they're capable of storing that, and they're capable of making the correct, modifying their behavior based on that information to their benefit.

 

Rob Bell:

I mean, in the case of those strawberry plants, you know, they're badass.

 

James Wong:

Yeah, so, I mean, I'm not...

 

I'm definitely not implying that plants have consciousness, but in the same way that your phone can learn, I think that it's an appropriate thing to say that plants can learn, depending on, you know, the learning being different from our normal learning.

 

Rob Bell:

Brilliant.

 

Anything else to say on the browse line?

 

If not, we will move on to the next sketch.

 

No?

 

Any other questions?

 

No, let's move on.

 

Let's move on.

 

As set out at the beginning of the podcast, we're going to bring part one of our Botany episode with James to a close there.

 

But you can, and indeed you should, continue to listen to part two, where we go on to explore the hungry gap, phoenix trees and growing your own fresh air.

 

And where you can indulge in even more expert and fascinating insight from James Wong on the wonderful world of Botany.

 

If, on the other hand, you've completed your commute and need to get on with some work, or you've done all the housework and you're popping out with friends, then don't worry, part two will be here whenever you're next ready to tune in.

 

Thank you for listening, and do send any queries or thoughts on the topics we've discussed to hello at sketchplanations.com.

 

Enjoy part two when you get there.

 

Go well, stay well.

 

Goodbye for now.

 

All music on this podcast series is sourced from the very talented Franc Cinelli.

 

And you can find loads more tracks at franccinelli.com