Now we’re coming into South America,” Alan Carle tells a visitor as he and his wife, Susan, lead the way through the 30-acre botanical garden they’ve created on the northeastern coast of Australia. Aside from a path of stubbly grass, the place looks more like a jungle than a garden. Tangled vines wrap around palm trees whose high canopy filters the tropic sun. Strange tree barks warn you to keep your distance: Some are covered with sharp-pointed pyramids, others radiate three-inch-long black needles. The leaves are even stranger: jagged philodendron so huge they seem hallucinogenic; fat, heart-shaped leaves in deep green marching up a tree trunk as if they had been tacked on one by one. Acanthus-shaped leaves slowly fan the humid air. A fast-flowing stream whooshes somewhere beyond.
The Carles stop at what looks like a procession of red-and-pink torches. The “flames” are actually pineapple-shaped blooms on green-and-purple stalks. “Here, try a costus flower,” says Alan, plucking a blossom from its pinecone-like sleeve. “They’re very refreshing. No one knew they were edible before I tried them.” Susan smiles and says, “Alan will eat anything. I’ve seen him turn red, swell up, and land in the emergency room.” This is hardly a reassuring invitation, but the flowers are watery and very lightly sweet—a cool sip on a hot, damp day.
They are just one of the hundreds of edible revelations at the Carles’ Botanical Ark, a kind of magic garden tucked into the rain forest of Queensland, a few miles from the Great Barrier Reef. The couple, both American expatriates, have spent the past 20 years gathering more than 3,000 species of plants from far-flung tropical regions in the course of an impassioned and admittedly eccentric quest to save the flora of the world’s rain forests from the ravages of political turmoil and industrial pollution. What was once weedy wasteland riven by the streams and creeks that crisscross this low-lying, wet territory is now so dense with foliage that the only way to traverse it is to walk along the narrow paths.
Statistics about the disappearance of the world’s rain forests and the accompanying loss of plant and animal species are familiar: An area the size of a football field is slashed and burned every seven seconds by rapacious loggers, miners, oilmen, and developers. In Australia alone, says Alan, dozens of varieties of fruit that were in commercial production just a few decades ago are no longer available. Secondary species have dropped out of cultivation—and even out of consciousness—and the forests themselves are vanishing even faster.
“The burning of rain forests is like the burning of libraries,” he says. “What if we lose something that might someday be important for disease resistance? What if a volcano in Hawaii comes along and destroys the last example of a certain species of tree?”
It was questions like these that set the Carles on their headstrong path. Knowing that everything comes down to commercial utility, they made the decision to target secondary species—close relatives of plants known to be valuable for food, medicine, textiles, and construction—and use them to re-create the world’s principal tropical zones in miniature so as to demonstrate the amazing range of tangible benefits a rain forest can provide if it’s simply left alone to grow.
In South America, for example, Alan explains as he nonchalantly chews a flower, the costus plant is valued for more than just its beauty (though the market for cut flowers accounts for its worldwide planting). The stems can be woven into mats, and juice from the stalks provides a drink that some Indian peoples use to cure earache. And, as Alan has discovered without any emergency-room detours, the flowers taste surprisingly good strewn over a salad. Stopping beside another tree, he reaches up into its long, shiny leaves and removes what looks like an oversize, thin-skinned lemon. Taking a penknife from his back pocket, he cuts the fruit open to reveal translucent white flesh and a big hollow seed like a giant lychee.
“Watch out, it’s sticky,” he says, offering a half. He means the skin, which exudes a gummy secretion that sticks to the hand and lips. The flesh comes out in big, jellylike sections that taste of caramel. This is another multipurpose plant: The leaves of the abiu can be made into an antiseptic paste, but the tree is prized for its fruit, and that’s why Carle wanted to plant it.
“These are delicious,” he says, sucking on the other half. “Suzi makes them into ice cream. But there’s only so many you can eat, and twenty years ago I needed enough seeds so that I could grow abiu in the garden. I went to the market in Iquitos, Peru, where the fruit is produced and sold. The market’s just up the banks from the river, and sometimes you had to wade through floodwater to get from one part to the other. It was a wild place then, with pigs running around and vultures circling. I was with a collecting friend, and we decided to buy a hundred-kilo bag and cut up the fruit and give it away. We told people they could eat as much as they wanted as long as they gave us the seeds. Two lines appeared out of nowhere, and two turned into twenty. The mob was pushing against us so hard we were frightened we’d hurt someone. Somebody offered us his hut, so we could pass the pieces through a window. That worked, even though people started throwing the skins back at us as a joke. We wound up with sticky hair from the latex, but we left with a hundred and fifty seeds.”
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