Scientists come in all shapes and sizes and with all kinds of interests. Some spend their entire careers studying beetles or ants or birds, some start their workdays in underwater diving suits, and some rest during the day and work at night, when the rare bats are out. Among the most exciting of these jobs are the ones performed by scientists who collect things.

	« Kew Gardens, near London, is one of the world's celebrated repositories of plant life collected from around the globe. This is Kew's Glass House, which houses tropical specimens that like high humidity and plenty of soft light. (Fred Powledge)
» An equally famed storehouse of plant diversity is the Missouri Botanical Garden, which resides in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States. The garden has hectares of traditional and exotic plants and trees, but one of its highlights is this enormous dome, which houses a working rainforest. {Fred Powledge}

No, not baseball cards or Barbie dolls. These scientists go to places where other humans don’t ordinarily go. They climb trees in search of new creatures to discover in the forest canopy, or they swim to the bottom of water-filled caves, or they get to go to awe-inspiring but very sweaty places like the Amazon rain forest to look for new plants and animals.

And some of them search for new foods.

The “new foods” these collectors are seeking are not ready to microwave and put on the table. Often, they’re are not really edible, and some are downright poisonous. Rather, these are the wild relatives of foods we already eat — distant cousins of potatoes, wheat, rice, tomatoes, and peanuts, for example. Each of these discoveries represents a bundle of diversity that might be useful in breeding new and improved varieties of our favorite foods. (See the pages on History of agriculture and on Mendel and his experiments with peas.)

Plant collecting has a long and colorful history. A lot of that history seems to be based on a quality that we all seem to share: We’re never completely satisfied with what we have, so we’d like to sample what’s available elsewhere. In other words, the grass is greener on the other side. Or, humans are just plain curious. How many times have you been tempted to buy something because its label said “New!”?

Nowhere is this more evident than with foods. The Sumerians, the culture that existed in Mesopotamia, dispatched collectors to Asia to search for figs and vines in 2500 BC. Why? Because the figs and vines didn’t grow at home. They were “New!” to the Sumerians.

When the Portuguese and other explorers of the fifteenth century sailed to the New World of the Americas, they were looking for (1) a short route to China, (2) cities that, they heard, were made of gold. They didn’t find either one, but they did discover (3) all sorts of fruits, vegetables, spices, and grains that were new to them. They took these back to Europe, where the new foods became all the rage, not only of people who liked to eat exotic foods but also of the marketplace. Imagine how exciting it would be the first on your block to eat pepper for the first time, or an orange!

“Borrowing” seeds and plants.
Governments were quick to understand the value of “borrowing” seeds and plants from other centers of diversity, particularly if the nations that did the borrowing did not have a lot of diversity themselves. When diplomats were posted abroad, they were instructed by their governments to gather local seeds and send them back to their home offices.

Many of these nation-to-nation collecting trips produced plants, as well as foods, that were housed and regrown in botanical gardens back at home, much as zoos display animals that are completely foreign to the local population. One of the most famous of these places is Kew Gardens, near London, which houses thousands of plant species that are totally foreign to England. Another is the Missouri Botanical Garden, in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States. Both the Missouri garden and Kew provide comfortable homes for tropical species in huge, humid glass houses that are architectural treasures of their own..

Not only does plant collecting have a colorful history; as often as not, the scientists who do the collecting are themselves more colorful than your average person. You’ll meet a few of them in the pages that follow.

As with archaeology and astronomy, much of the serious work of plant collecting has been done by talented, dedicated amateurs. These include missionaries and military personnel, as well as diplomats. Missionary farmers, for example, brought hard-shelled walnuts from South America to California in the late 1770s. One of the most famous of the politician-collectors was Thomas Jefferson, who gathered material during his stint as a U.S. minister to a foreign country.

Jefferson, who wrote the United States Declaration of Independence and served as the country’s third president, was for a while his nation’s representative to France. He brought back European chestnut trees, tomatoes, tea, vanilla, and French olive trees. Once, while traveling in Italy, he made notes on the construction of a machine to make macaroni. After the U.S. got seriously interested in collecting germplasm from elsewhere, it requested travellers abroad to bring back plants and cuttings. This is an act that will get you in a very slow Customs line at an international airport today. (Why? Because many non-native plants can overrun native ones. See the forthcoming AboutBiodiversity section on Invasive Species for a closer look.)

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