Plant collecting isn’t always that much fun. Alan once turned a corner in the streets of Guate-mala City, which was on military alert after a coup, and found the muzzle of a machine gun pressed against his neck, held by a teenage soldier. A pistol greeted him on his return to a Colombian hotel, pointed into his stomach by a narcotics inspector who wanted to know what the big rush was to get back to his room. Matters didn’t improve when the inspector found a floor littered with seeds covered in white fungicide. After ascertaining that the seeds were for food plants by tasting each one, the inspector told Carle he was wasting his talents—that he ought to be in the drug business.
And the difficulties the Carles encounter don’t end when they get home. Australian customs officials may not be armed, but the requirements of the quarantine inspection service are stringent and becoming more so. The couple have often seen seeds that they’ve lovingly gathered inadvertently destroyed by fumigators, and they’ve gone to pick up plants impounded at the quarantine service’s greenhouse only to find them dead. To eliminate such problems, the Carles have now built their own greenhouse, and they pay government inspectors to check their seeds and permit them to be planted in the garden.
A private botanical garden requiring frequent trips around the world sounds like the noblesse oblige of a rich 19th-century eccentric. But the Carles arrived in Australia penniless. And they created the Ark without the help of outside funding and with few able bodies other than their own.
The first thing they transplanted was themselves—Alan from upstate New York, Susan from Brooklyn—to a country where they knew no one. Alan, a handsome, robust man who is now 50, says he knew he belonged in Australia from the time when, as a young adolescent, he read an article on the South Pacific in National Geographic. But his parents didn’t yield to his repeated requests to move him and his three siblings anywhere within swimming distance of the Great Barrier Reef. So in 1970, at the age of 19, he bought a one-way ticket to Sydney. (The move was not to avoid the draft; Australia, unlike Britain and Canada, was sending troops to Vietnam.) He knew he loved water and thought he might study marine biology.
Once he’d enrolled at a university in Queensland and found part-time work, Alan wrote to Susan asking her to come visit. He had met the classically pretty girl in the Catskills four summers earlier, when he was 15. She was just ten and had been sent to a summer home there by the Norwegian Children’s Home, in Bay Ridge, where she was raised. The two kept in touch through letters, and after a year at Brooklyn College, Susan decided to take Alan up on his invitation. A young woman who had never lived outside a city soon found herself in a hut in the rain forest without electricity or running water, collecting wood every night for the cookstove. What was meant to be a six-month visit has now lasted 25 years.
During months of work on a campaign to fight proposed oil drilling in the Barrier Reef and logging in virgin Queensland rain forest, Alan’s interests began shifting to dry land—if you can call a place that averages 100 inches of rain a year dry. In 1975, he abandoned his dream of building an underwater house and research station and began looking for a plot of cleared land. With Susan’s help, he found an ideal site: 30 acres of unused grazing terrain an hour north of the city of Cairns, surrounded by the protected Daintree National Park, a lush rain forest declared a World Heritage Site.
Their original idea was to build a full-service ark, in three five-year stages. First they would identify the most important plants not yet in the country and go get them. Then they’d do the same with native animals and birds. Finally, they’d plant and create new sources of alternative energy. Financial constraints soon scaled back their vision. “We’re still on the first five-year plan,” Alan says.
To pay for the land and the collecting expeditions, the two took a series of odd jobs—Alan as a builder and gardener, Susan as a waitress and teacher—alternating shifts to allow one to travel and the other to work in the garden and look after their two daughters (the eldest was born on their first collecting trip, which lasted 11 months). They also tried growing fruit on a commercial scale, but it proved too time-consuming. Flowers eventually provided a way to make the land pay for itself, and for a few years the Carles were the country’s largest grower of tropical varieties.
Today, they support the Ark primarily by hosting groups of visitors who come for a walk in the garden and a meal featuring herbs and fruits picked that morning. The house they’ve built in their spare time over the years is attractive and airy, with floors of warm red tulip oak and a wide deck overlooking a small lake and a tall saraca tree, called the butterfly tree for its ability to attract dozens of the colorful insects at a time.
The deck is a lovely place to sample breadfruit chips, pillowy deep-fried wedges sprinkled with sea salt, and then one of Susan’s superb Thai curries, with fresh turmeric, curry leaves, galangal, red pepper, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, and any of the 200 or so kinds of ginger the couple grows. Susan places the ingredients, just as she dug or cut them, on a tray for visitors to examine. A salad follows, sprinkled with costus flowers, and then dessert—often guanabana (soursop) cheesecake with passion-fruit pulp.
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