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Madagascar

Madagascar, the world’s fourth largest island, broke away from the African continent 105 million years ago, and the flora and fauna that have evolved in its isolation are among the most remarkable in the world. It is second only to Hawai‘i in its rate of endemism, the occurrence of species found nowhere else. All lemurs and half the world’s chameleons come from Madagascar. Eggs are still found from a 12-foot tall bird that has vanished in the 1500 years since man first arrived.

New plant species are found every year in the dwindling eastern forests, today less than a third of their original size. Unique families of swollen, spiny plants, unrelated to cactus, dominate the dry central plateau. Tragically, much of the flora is being lost to firewood collecting.

Extracts from the Madagascar periwinkle are effective against childhood leukemia. Who knows how many other equally beneficial plants will go extinct before we can even learn their value?

The country’s severe overpopulation and poverty have made conservation of its priceless botanical wealth almost impossible. An intensive international rescue effort led by the World Wildlife Fund is underway.

Seychelles

The Seychelles are a cluster of 115 small islands off the east coast of Africa, north of Madagascar.  The islands, then uninhabited, were first seen by Dutch explorers in the 16th century.  Huge tortoises and plants unknown to the rest of the world thrived in isolation.

Two centuries later the Seychelles became one of the last places in the world to be colonized by man-mostly French settlers and their African slaves.  The diverse highly endemic flora includes the bizarre Lodoiecea palm with the largest seed in the plant kingdom.  The spiny Verschafeltia splendida palm whose trunk supported by diagonal stilt roots tapers to a point above ground.

This collection is only a fraction of the 90 or so plants unque to the Seychelles, but all were grown from seeds or cuttings collected from the wild areas of the islands and sent to Waimea Valley.