One of the most wonderful things about working as a botanist is the sheer number of plants that are out there. It is estimated that there are 400,000 species on Earth – I say estimated, because more than 1,000 are recorded as new to science each year so no plant scientist can ever know all of them.
And it’s this incredible diversity that occasionally throws up something that captures our imagination – so much that our passion to grow them sets off ripples that revolutionise not just horticulture, but the entire way we live our lives, even architecture. A classic example of this can be found in the most unlikely of places: the upper tributaries of the Amazon rainforest.
The enormous leaves of giant waterlilies, Victoria sp, aren’t just fascinating for their incredible size, being large enough to support the weight of a child, but for the way they changed the face of modern architecture. When seeds of this amazing plant first made their way to Victorian England from South America, they sparked off a race among the British aristocracy as to who could be the first to get one to flower.
The problem was that its huge leaves just kept growing and growing, which meant the elaborate heated pools and the specially constructed glasshouses used to house them had to get ever bigger. This posed a massive problem for architects and engineers at the time, because until that point there wasn’t really the technology to create large, pillarless expanses wide enough.
By an amazing twist of fate the solution to this conundrum lay in the very leaves they were trying to grow. The plants themselves are only able to create such vast lily pads due to an elaborate network of ribbed veins, creating reinforced mini-arches to support their weight, distributing the load over a series of “cells”. This was noticed by ingenious horticulturist Joseph Paxton, who despite no formal architectural or engineering training, realised this same technique could be employed to form huge, glazed structures.
He used this to construct the enormous Crystal Palace to hold the Great Exhibition in London in the mid-1800s. It was a total revolution in architecture, being the structure with the greatest area of glass ever seen at the time. It’s these techniques that lead to the creation of pretty much every large public building in the world, from shopping malls to airports to office blocks.
It has even been argued that without structures able to physically hold such large gatherings, where people of different social strata can mix, the world would be a much more segregated place than it is today. All, apparently, thanks to a waterlily and the obsession it triggered in our minds to see it bloom.
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