Mark Watson is in Kathmandu, negotiating an unusual project: to carry live plants and seeds out of Nepal and back to the UK. In an effort to conserve the country's abundant flora, Mr Watson and his colleagues are about to start collecting and documenting every one of Nepal's 6,000-7,000 species of plant.
Mr Watson, a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, and his colleague Colin Pendry have spent much of the last two years training 16 local botanists in Nepal. This week they will be putting the trainees through their final paces, testing them on everything from herbarium management to plant drying, before starting the project in earnest. They are expecting the mammoth undertaking to take them 15 years, but when it is finished the new plantlife record, or flora, will be the first official record of Nepal's rich plant environment and an invaluable aid for conservationists working out how best to protect and maintain the mountain nation's unique variety of plants.
Although it takes up only 0.09% of the planet's land surface, Nepal squeezes in everything from steamy jungles to frozen Himalayan mountains. This huge variation in altitude and environment makes it one of the most plant-rich countries in the world. By comparison the UK has 2,000 species recorded in its own flora.
The Royal Botanic Gardens already has a few of Nepal's most elusive plants. Collected over 100 years ago by Victorian explorers, the delicate plants have been nurtured by generations of botanists. Back in their native homeland some have not fared quite so well and are on the verge of extinction. The botanists hope to reintroduce Victorian and modern seedlings to Nepal from the Edinburgh gardens.
They will set about collecting the thousands of different plants in the same way the Victorians did - by going out and hunting for them. Part of the training has involved three expeditions, with the most recent, in September, going to the Sagarmatha national park in the Mount Everest region. On these expeditions each botanist specialises in a particular plant group and gathers specimens.
Unlike their Victorian counterparts, these plant gatherers are assisted by hi-tech equipment. "We use GPS to work out the exact location and altitude of each specimen, digital cameras to take photos and a laptop to make ecological notes about each plant," says Mr Watson. Back at the camp the plants are pressed and dried using heat dryers. In remote locations without electricity this means carrying generators up to the camps to power the computers and kerosene to power the plant drying machines.
As well as an adventurous spirit, some plant collecting also requires steady nerves and a head for heights. "There are some species that only grow along the branches of tall trees and others that prefer rocky cliff faces," says Mr Watson. Meconopsis horridula, a blue, poppy-like flower and the symbol of the Edinburgh Royal Botanical Gardens, only grows on crags above 4,000 metres. "It was a stunningly exciting moment when we found one and a brave Sherpa guide collected it from the crag for us," says Mr Pendry. The terrain is not the only difficulty for plant collectors in Nepal. "Certain areas are problematic for collecting because of the Maoist insurgents," he adds.
So far the Edinburgh collectors have documented around 600 plant species on the expeditions, enough to fill one of the 10 volumes they expect to produce. "It might not be considered very fashionable to be doing this Victorian science of plant collecting, but it is a fundamental necessity for scientific work in the future: if you can't name the plants then you can't do anything with them," said Mr Pendry.
