What can 450 million years of plant evolution teach us about the world we live in today? This week, I’m joined by horticulturist and author Ben Dark to discuss his latest book, *Green Kingdom*, exploring the stories behind plant evolution, botanical classification and our changing understanding of the natural world.
Benny’s Insect of the Week: Field Digger Wasp
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If you enjoyed this week’s episode with Ben Dark, you might also enjoy these episodes from the archives:
Episode 169: Darwin’s Garden with Dr Jude Piesse
Jude Piesse explores the largely forgotten garden of Charles Darwin’s childhood home in Shrewsbury, revealing the people, stories and horticultural history that shaped this remarkable place. It’s a fascinating companion to Ben’s discussion of plant history, bringing together gardens, literature and the people behind our understanding of the natural world.
Episode 164: By Any Other Name with Simon Morley
Artist, art historian and rose gardener Simon Morley explores the cultural history of the rose, from its symbolism and origins to its enduring place in gardens and human society. Like Ben, Simon looks beyond the plants themselves to uncover the stories, ideas and cultural influences that shape how we understand and use them.
Sarah Wilson: This is the Roots and All podcast, and I’m your host, Sarah Wilson. Join me as I talk about all aspects of gardening with some of the top horticulturists from around the world. This week, I’m joined by horticulturist and author Ben Dark to explore his latest book, Green Kingdom, which traces the evolution of plants since their very beginnings and the people who’ve helped us to understand them. We talk about plant evolution, the tangled history of botanical classification, and why both science and storytelling have a part to play in how we see the natural world.
Ben Dark: So, I am Ben Dark, and I am a sort of lapsed horticulturist, but for—for many years, for the best part of two decades, I was on—on the tools, gardener-gardener. I started in my very early twenties with a course at Capel Manor College in horticulture, and then went from there to the Garden Museum to do a year as their trainee, which was quite an interesting experience, and that kind of combined my sort of passions for history and—and for plants. And then after that, I just did um private horticulture for years because I found you could get more money and more flexibility working on big private estates, going up to—to head gardener level, while doing a little bit of writing and research in the background. I went and did a masters in garden history. And all of these sort of things have sort of braided together into a career as a—as a garden and plants writer, which is what I really do now.
Sarah Wilson: Yes, and you do it very well. So, you are two books in at the moment. Your new book Green Kingdom comes out—it will be out, I think, three days after this podcast airs. So, can you tell me as well, because I’ve read both your books, and I wanted to talk about the comparisons and differences between them a little bit, but could you give me an overview of the two of them before I do that?
Ben Dark: Absolutely. So, I—I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot, actually, trying to find threads and continuities between the two, and I think there’s more than initially it appears. The first book is—is almost a hyper-local focused book. It’s called The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 19 1/2 Front Gardens, and it’s about a walk down a street that I used to take every day in Camberwell taking my son to nursery, and the plants in the front gardens I passed and the stories they told.
And the second book is on a hugely different scale. It is the 450-million-year history of plants, how they came from little strands of beach algae on some shore of a planet completely devoid of life, um, well, land devoid of life, and came to be all of the plants that are around us today.
And so, initially they appear vastly different in scale and scope, and the only thing in common is the plants. But then I—my original subtitle for The Grove, I wanted it to be not A Nature Odyssey in 19 1/2 Front Gardens, but The History of Everything in 19 1/2 Front Gardens. I wanted it to try and tell the story of all the plants in the world in just that little street. So, it was kind of taking the—the microcosm and expanding it to cover the whole—the whole plant universe.
And the second book is—is the opposite, because it’s such a vast subject, everything that has ever grown, I kind of have to focus on the micro stories within it and focus down on some of the—the interesting people and plants within the um within Green Kingdom. So, I suppose that there is a continuity there, and the second continuity is just it’s all about bringing that—that backdrop, that green thing in which we live, in front of which we live our lives, to the forefront, making people see the—the staggering stories that are there, whether they are peering into a pond full of duckweed or wandering along a little street taking their son to nursery. So, I think there is—there is a theme, and hopefully I’ll carry on developing it for the rest of my writing career.
Sarah Wilson: Yeah, there definitely is a theme. But I did wonder, because as you say you’ve got the kind of hyper-local focus and then you step back and take in the immense sweep of time, did you find one was better at revealing stories than the other, or was it just different?
Ben Dark: It’s different. I mean, the—the stories, when you’re doing a sort of a work of local history, when you find anything, it’s—it’s a gem, and you’re like, “Well, this is—this is—this is the bit of grit that I can build my—my pearl around.” And so that’s really an exciting process. Whereas when you’re doing something as vast as Green Kingdom, this this new book, there’s—there’s too much to find out. There’s too many—too many grits and grains, and the danger is actually you just spend all your time reading yet one more book, one more PDF, and never actually getting down to writing it or—or condensing the stories. Um, so in a way, actually the the fact that there was a dearth of information about this pretty exceptional street about which I wrote my first book made it almost easier to write than the second book where—where I have everything to consider.
Sarah Wilson: How on earth do you find all those connections between plants and people? Some of them, you know, you follow this thread and you think, how did you find that? There’s a particular one, and I’m not focusing on your older book because I want to talk about your new one, but there was a bit where you talked about Vita Sackville-West and she’d done a photo shoot, I think, at—
Ben Dark: Oh god, yeah. Okay, that was Noel. Yeah, that was Noel. Um, because Vita Sackville-West, I mean, lovely as she is, this—this sort of horrible, wounded old old snob and spent most of her life, I think, wounded by losing Noel, which due to sort of primogeniture didn’t go to her. She—she was the eldest in that family. By rights, Noel should have been inherited by her. She ended up at Sissinghurst because she had to go to a man. It went to her uncle instead, and this deeply, deeply, I think, wounded and affected her. So, now Sissinghurst is a National Trust property, but she used to um write all the time behind her once she—she hated that hard little plaque, that National Trust sign that she had to see on Noel, which she thought should have been hers by right. But also, it was quite interesting to me because she wrote about how much she detested almost the common man. And Vita is as sort of embodiment in the—in the sixties of the rise of the common man, the rise of the—the pleb and the prole, and the fact that they ended up filming one of their videos, I think it might be um can’t remember what it is, maybe Paperback Writer, at Noel, on a horse going through these grounds at the same time as Vita is writing about her aristocratic exile from Noel, and they just came together to me as this lovely little—little picture of what a garden is and what it means beyond—beyond just the plants that grew there. And so that was—that was a really nice little bit to—to find. So worth watching that video if you—if you want to see what Noel used to look like and seeing the Beatles riding their horses through the grounds.
Sarah Wilson: Oh, I’ll definitely dig that out. Moving on to think about Green Kingdom, I felt like there’s almost this kind of tension between using the system of classification that we have in place and pushing back against it and the people who invented it and applied it. And I kind of feel like there’s definitely a tension there for you, I think, that, you know, you’ve studied, you love plants, you’re a very accomplished horticulturist, and so you use that system of classification a lot, and it’s very useful to you to understand the plant world. But then also there’s all the things that are wrapped up in it. Do you feel that that’s a kind of thing that you kick about with and think, you know, I love this, but I also don’t love it at the same time?
Ben Dark: Yeah, I mean, I have problems with—with taxonomy and modern taxonomy as, well, firstly, as a—as a gardener, as all of us do, the amount of times you go to a client’s house and you use the—the new terminology and they say, “Well, actually this is not that, that’s a Mambricia, not a Crocosmia and you look slightly foolish.” I have those—those sort of work-a-day complaints. But also I—I mean, I am a—I mean, I, in the book I don’t shy away from the problems with taxonomy, either fact that most of it commemorates a very small group of men from a very small area of land, i.e., Western Europe, and commemorates and names plants that have had names for far, far, far longer and had been described in great depth by local sources. But I also want to talk about the importance of taxonomy and almost resurrect it as a subject, because it is fascinating and it is important, and it is one of these when we get frustrated because the splitters have created a new genus or taken our favorite plants and renamed them. I’m trying to show that that isn’t arbitrary work for the sake of it, that is the reflection of some seismic evolutionary event, a speciation occurrence in the distant histories of those plants, maybe the rise of a mountain that divided these two sets of plants and gave them slightly different characteristics, and that we shouldn’t see it necessarily as busy work and unnecessary muddling our lives, but as something fantastic, an extra link, an extra little—little twig sketched onto this great tree of life that us botanists, horticulturists, and everyone who cares about plants are—are trying to—to grow and connect up until we—until we know their full story. So, yeah, I think you’re right to—to pick up a bit of conflict uh in my attitudes to—to taxonomy, taxonomists, and how it’s been carried out. But I wouldn’t take a—a sort of Ruskin approach, like John Ruskin, who was appalled by the whole lot of it and the fact that the scientists had taken over from the poets in—in describing the plants of our worlds.
Sarah Wilson: I mean, you did write about his idea that kind of by unpacking all of nature’s secrets, then we destroy the romanticism. And so obviously you don’t subscribe to that point of view. However, I do feel sometimes because of the nature of your writing, you know, you’re using the system of classification, but you’re actually padding it out with stories of people and places. So, in a way, the romanticism and the taxonomy are going hand in hand.
Ben Dark: I completely agree. I think that’s a very—a very good and generous reading of it. And um I love Ruskin, I love the poetry of his writing and the—the way that he tried to encourage us to see the world through a poetic lens, and I hope that I—I’ve followed in his footsteps a little bit of this in—in that regard. But, but that I’ve also taken um taken a more scientific approach in parts to—to his attitude towards it all.
Sarah Wilson: I mean, ultimately you’ve arranged the book according to plant families. So, it’s an important thing that underpins your text. Why did you choose the families that you did choose?
Ben Dark: That’s a really good question, and my life since finishing writing it and submitting it has been a constant process of—of why didn’t I choose that family? Why haven’t I got this a family in there? Because there’s—there’s 700 plus families, and I wanted to really investigate some of them deeply, so I could only choose 16. The first, I would say, six are fairly obvious because they chart the emergence of modern plants as we know them. So, each family is represents a leap in the development of plants. So, I start with the—the mosses. In this case, Sphagnaceae, the bog mosses, which are the first represent those first bryophyte-like plants, the first to live on land. Now take the club mosses, so the things that formed the coal swamps, the um Lepidodendron kind of species in the ancient world and the little club mosses that we might know today from our woodland floors, and they represent the ability to put on vascular tissue in height. Then you get ferns with the crew leaves and through the ginkgo sperms, so the ginkgoes, the cycads, the pines, all of these are sort of adding to a story. It’s got a very nice narrative structure. And then suddenly you have this explosion of plants with the angiosperms, the flowering families, which make up the vast majority of the species and families in the world today. And there it really is a matter of some of this personal preference. Some of it is the fact that I’d found a single person who I just loved and wanted to tell their story. So, something like the grasses, can’t be ignored. They’ve done so much to change our world. But something like the—the campanulas, campanulaceae, which I focus on, I started with the story of Felix Platter, a little—a little teenager writing a diary in the 16th century, and then from him it out the rest of the family. Luckily, he is a—a man connected with Campanula pyramidalis, which he collected in a barrier. But if you go to that family, you’ve got all of the Lobelias and the lobeliads, and the plants of Hawaii. You’ve got hummingbirds. You’ve got all sorts of other things that you can tie in once you have that—that first sort of person to—to build your chapter around. So, it was a real—it was a real mix of these people who called for me and the people and the plants that really could not be ignored like—like the grasses and the orchids that—that made me choose my—my families to focus on.
Sarah Wilson: So, you spoke about plant evolution. Actually, I’m going to ask you, is Felix Platter’s diary widely available, because it sounds like that, it’s rich green to read?
Ben Dark: It’s not widely available. You can get it. There’s an English translation. The English translation is called Beloved Son Felix, and it’s um I listed it in the—in the bibliography in the notes, so you should be able to find it there. But it is—it is. It’s like the diary of—of Adrian Mole, but just somehow set in the laws of religion, um and um he is a—it’s such an endearing character. So, half the time he’s wandering around sort of um seeing these people preaching and burning hellfire in Protestants strung up um in the fields, and the other half of the time he’s trying to experiment with potions to grow himself an extra extra long beard with his friend, and all he accomplishes is ruining their pillows. And um he’s—he’s a character. He was so nice to find because you realize here is a man from a time that we feel is so distant, and yet through this diary you’re able to bring him in front of the person, and that’s kind of what I’ve tried to do with some of the—the extinct plants that I will talk about in this book, because because we know that 99% of plants that have ever existed have gone extinct, and some of those are so vital to the story of plants, that I kind of want to bring them back to life and make them as—as real for us as—as Felix Platter is—is made for us by his diary. So, it’s—it was quite a nice symmetry between—between him and the subjects that I was talking about.
Sarah Wilson: Yeah, it was, it was great. As so many of the stories are, you know, they’re just bringing it to life. You spoke about traveling through the evolution of plants, and which they have done for hundreds of millions of years without a brain or a nervous system. And yet they kind of seem to working in relationship with each other and everything else that’s on the planet. Do you think studying that process has made you challenge our definition of intelligence, or even, I suppose, the concept of what it is to be alive?
Ben Dark: Yeah, I think it has. I mean, it’s very clear that if we look at life in the classic tree of life form, and um every species inhabits the end of a certain twig, and each plant inhabits the end of their evolutionary twig in the exact same way that we end inhabit our twig, and there is no one that is superior and the right chosen way. And we have this set of biases that come, some of them are intellectual biases, so we spend a lot of time thinking and think that things that don’t think like us are what lesser than us. Some of them are just in terms of scale. We are relatively large, and we think that things are relatively small, such as many plants, are worthy of—of being ignored. And just as there’s no necessarily better way to live your life. I think the line I use in the book, I’m talking about club moss and Samuel Butler, the Victorian satirist, and I’m sort of saying that um there’s nothing inherently superior about living life in a gentleman’s club or floating on the surface of a pond. And almost we realize that we—we see plants, and you mentioned intelligence there, plants as—I mean, woefully inadequate to be measured by our own definitions of intelligence, or the intelligence that—that you and I on a gardening podcast might be displaying to each other. They’re just completely different things. I mean, a plant will have a sense of the area around it and ability to communicate. It has an intelligence of sorts, but it’s on such a strange and different dimension that I think you can’t really judge it alongside a human intelligence. You just have to acknowledge that it exists and hope to learn as much as you possibly can about it.
Sarah Wilson: Yeah, I guess as well, not just intelligence and evolution, but that idea of being an individual is a question, really, when you think about how interlinked things are, which leads me on to think, obviously you pull so many strands together, I have no idea how you do it. You obviously just got this immense talent to take information, and you’re obviously reading incredibly widely and have so many sources. Do you sometimes think I’ve got so many plates spinning here, you know, there’s so many threads to tie together that actually I’m struggling to do it, and I don’t even know what the end goal of this kind of tying everything together is, because there are no true stories, there’s no answers, there’s no, you know, resolution, it’s just I have to follow this thread and then let it go when the time is right and when I feel I’ve reached some sort of conclusion. Is that sometimes frustrating or is it more tantalizing because you think there’s always something else I can be following?
Ben Dark: I mean, it is—it is worrying, and I—and I hope that it doesn’t give the impression too much of—of plates wildly spinning with an author horribly running behind them. I think a lot of it is—is quite satisfying when I—when I know I’ve hit an ending. A lot of it comes from I—I was one of the first waves of garden bloggers back in—back in 2008 or so. And one of the things you learn from doing those short-form pieces every week or a couple of days is you have to hit an ending. You have to tie it up. You can’t just go on forever, even though the internet is an unlimited space that lets you go on forever if you want to. No one’s going to read it unless you can tie it together with a punchline or a—a conclusion or something that—that sums up what you’re going through. So, I think that sort of discipline ran through the writing, and I hope that all of my chapters took from that the fact that, yes, you start with all these things, but then they come back. So, the threads, I make sure there’s always a bit of history, a bit of science, a bit of myself, not very much, and a—a few nice bits of—of descriptive um botany or description of my experience. And I sort of know when I’ve hit the line on which the chapter needs to finish. My—my great compliment, I had a review in the US, so the US editions coming out later, so they’re just starting to put together the trade reviews, which was describing the book as a—as a collection of essays, which is really not, because it is the story. But at the same time, I think they do function as essays in that they all have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you can imagine each of them sort of excerpted into a—into a magazine. You could say, “Oh yeah, I could pick that up and—and read that and feel satisfied and move on.” Um, so I think it was a challenge, but it wasn’t too—wasn’t one that—that sort of sent me howling and tearing my hair out.
Sarah Wilson: Well, that’s good. Yeah, no, I—I did not in any way mean to imply that you don’t resolve your chapters, they’re brilliant stories and they are standalone pieces, absolutely. It’s just that I—I am aware that you must have to synthesize so much information to get where you get to, and I just, you know, from a personal level was just curious how you manage to do that without going completely insane or having an office covered in like a billion post-it notes. So, and um—[laughs] those—those detectives hunting a serial killer with all of the post-it notes—exactly that.
Sarah Wilson: The other thing that I was going to say as well is about touching on your podcast as well. You bring a lot of gardening and literature together and also I guess the experience of being in a landscape from a personal level. Again, I suppose it’s a little bit going over the ground that we’ve already covered, but particularly from the literature point of view, do you feel that bringing that in just enlightens you and adds another dimension to what would otherwise be quite a scientific knowledge?
Ben Dark: Yeah, I think it really does, because it lets you see these plants through someone else’s eyes, which is all that I’m doing is showing plants through my eyes. And the fact that—that there is a history of people who’ve had better thoughts than me in the past and written them down in such a wonderful way, just gives me a chance to take the reader into the outside someone else’s head for a second, which is useful, and I think—and I think a treat. I like it when I find really good plant writing outside of the traditional garden writers, because it’s everywhere in our culture. Plants are so—so important to—to humanity and have been forever. You can find it everywhere, which unfortunately means you need to—to read every book if you want to get every good plant description. Something that I’m still—still struggling with.
Sarah Wilson: Yes. Well, uh thanks to you, I’ve added more books to my book pile, and they’re not actually even horticultural books, their fiction stuff. So, [laughs] yeah, not that I needed more books on my book pile, but there were some good ones that you mentioned. So, I just wanted to finish, because I think towards the end of the book you talk about DNA plant identification. [Ben: Yeah.] And again, I think you push back on it a little bit. I think you almost felt that was a step too far and it loses something of the essence of taxonomy. Do you think that’s fair to say?
Ben Dark: I think it probably is a good reading of that, that last little bit of the book. I wouldn’t say that it’s gone too far. What I’d say is that it’s rather taken over in terms of funding and priority from classic observational botany. I think that the actual—the—the science of molecular phylogeography and building these family trees from the DNA connection between plants is—is vital. It’s what Darwin predicted early on that—that one day our taxonomies will become genealogies. So, by separating all these plants, we actually do build the tree of life. I think that’s vital. But that is what is getting funding in the botanical science courses as they still exist in the universities now, and it leads to a lot of people who are incredibly adept at extracting bits of DNA and telling the stories in bits of—of—of the four-letter coding of plants. And so you can tell exactly when the ancestor of the Titan Arum and the duckweed separated from each other, which is great and it’s very vital and useful knowledge, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the plant’s form. Those codes don’t tell you that one of them is this great big chimney of scent sending up smells into the canopy and another is a tiny floating thing on the surface of a pond. You can’t see that from those strands of code. And I think that if we’re going to look after plants and care for them, they also need people who still go out and see the wonders of the plants out there in the world and what they do, and tell the stories, the kind of stories that are told in this book, alongside that equally vital and important work of separating the plants by their molecular differences.
Sarah Wilson: Thanks to Ben for joining me to explore the remarkable history of plants. If you enjoyed today’s episode, you might also like episode 169, Darwin’s Garden, and episode 164, By Any Other Name with Simon Morley. Your finding links to both in the show notes, and as always, thank you for listening. Next up is Benny with his Insect of the Week.
Benny: The field digger wasp. Scientific name, Mellinus arvensis. So my insect of the week this week is a solitary wasp. I don’t believe solitary wasps get the—necessary airtime and profile. The world is very focused on bees, which are fantastic, but solitary wasps are very, very special. Um, this one is one of the first ones that I learned. Um, it’s one of the later kind of species to be active in the season, kind of September onwards, for a few months. Um, where kind of a time of recording kind of 21st of October, so I’m unlikely to see one now, but it’s possible still just about.
The—etymology, actually, it’s a double Latin. One today, often the genus is Greek with a lot of the insects I look at. But the genus Mellinus comes from Latin, which relates to honey or honey-colored. So this wasp has nothing to do with honey, but it’s just the—it’s the kind of yellow coloration of the abdomen, which contrasts with the black. So yellow bands. Um, the epithet arvensis, you may have seen this in plants, uh, that relates to field. And arvum is the Latin for cultivated field or arable land, and arvensis kind signifies the original place. So it kind of belongs to the fields.
And there’s a reason for that, because this species is very closely-tied to flies and often flies that hang around dung or flies in other capacities, but I’ve seen them stalking flies on the field edge or on the plants then. So the field digger wasp parasitizes or preys on flies for its young to develop on, so it doesn’t consume them in itself, but it will paralyze flies, kind of muscid flies and other—sometimes, uh, hoverflies. Sometimes species of horseflies, but the most common ones are the muscidae. Uh, and that’s a really cool wasp. It’s quite interesting, actually, in terms of bees and wasps, they almost all nest in the sun and the sunniest kind of conditions. But this is one that will nest in the shade. In like very dappled, but quite heavily shaded woodlands I’ve seen them nesting in the sandy clay. In, for example, in Hampstead Heath, we saw them in the sandy clay there, which was pretty shady, and the literature does confirm that as well, that’s kind of a known thing. Or they will also nest in the sun in kind of sandy paths, lots of heathlands, very closely tied to plants like ivy and heather, which will be flowering kind of the end of summer. And you’ll see often see adults around those plants and they’ll be drinking nectar um prior to mating or in between. And as I’ve seen them as well, they’ll be kind of perched on fence posts and gates and other structures, just waiting for flies, and then they’ll kind of ambush them. Quite a—quite an amazing thing to see, and I’ve seen them stalking mounds of dung. So there’s all sorts of evidence of different mammal dung, whether it’s badgers, even dogs sometimes, uh, and the flies that are attracted to the dung, and good quality dung, I guess, without chemicals, and ivermectin, and the—the field digger wasp will be stalking those mounds of dung, waiting for the flies, and they’ll attempt to kind of swoop in, ambush the fly. And if they fail, they’ll kind of very quickly re-attempt. So they’re really cool. Kind of quite slender in the body, but a black and white, or black and yellow, sorry. A solitary wasp.
I really hope you’ve seen one. It might be quite unlikely that you have unless you’re really into solitary wasps at this point, but I’d like to try and give an understanding of the breadth of the species that are out there, what their ecology is, um what they’re up to, how they might be beneficial, how they all have a place in the landscape. So, if you have seen one, I’m sure you have already, record it on the apps, iRecord or iNaturalist. And if you haven’t seen one, then next year might be your opportunity, kind of from September, to keep an eye out or to look where records exist, or to come and hang out with me and we’ll go look for some.
Sarah Wilson: You can download or listen to the podcast direct from the website rootsandall.co.uk. Please also check out my Patreon, where you can make a one-off donation or take out a monthly subscription to help support the podcast. Because if you enjoy the show, please help it continue. I also have a GoFundMe where you can make a one-off donation. Even a one-off donation of one pound helps, and I will be really grateful for your support. So please go to Patreon or GoFundMe and search for Roots and All Podcast.
