But the real centerpiece is a selection of sliced fruit. The choice is seldom a problem: At any time of year there are at least 30 fruits available, and in the summer months, 70 or 80. Susan will combine new varieties of familiar fruits—blue Java bananas whose sweetness is balanced by a citrus tartness; yellow “lemon” papayas with flesh so pale it seems albino; yellow and pink-purple passion fruit in addition to those with the usual celadon shade—with fruits startlingly new to most visitors. Many people have eaten star fruit (carambola), for instance, and the lychee-like mangosteen, but few have tasted the grapefruitlike flesh of the Asian langsat, which looks like a small, light brown egg; or the nutty, oily dabai, or Borneo olive, which resembles a black date. And virtually no visitors have had extensive experience of the unctuous, avocado-like flesh of sapotes, from Central and South America. They range from the chocolate-pudding black to the extremely sweet, butternut-colored canistel, or yellow, with overtones of nutmeg. Garnish will be the Asian aqua cherry, or water cherry, which looks like a shiny bell on a Christmas tree and has an agreeably watery, light flavor.
After one of these meals, usually with 40 or so guests, the Carles fall into bed for their customary five or six hours of recovery time. They may be exhausted, but they can afford to pay only two workers rather than the dozens they could use. They have been fortunate to have the help of volunteer German horticulture students, who have been in residence for a few months at a time for decades. (“We tell them before they come,” Susan says, “that there are crocodiles, mosquitoes, and big snakes that can wrap around you and squeeze you to death. And that it rains like hell and we’re isolated. They still come. And they’re in heaven when they get here.”) But help from any government or institution, says Alan, was out of the question from the start. He gives plenty of reasons—that he wouldn’t even know where to look, for instance, though nearly all his peers in the international botanical garden society to which he belongs receive some sort of funding and could surely suggest avenues to pursue.
More importantly, he says, he wouldn’t want to betray the tribal elders, local plant enthusiasts, and botanists who have led him to secret places and given him secret plants. “We work with local people, and they give us what they think we should have,” he says. “They give these plants to us in good faith because they realize that the rain forest is being chopped down at a phenomenal rate.” The understanding is that no one should profit from the plants except the people living where they grow. Nor will the Carles ever endanger a plant’s survival in its native habitat. “Taking a couple of seeds out of their environment won’t do any damage,” Alan says. “It’s when you destroy the environment that you cause problems.”
To ensure survival of the plants should anything happen to the Ark, Alan routinely sends samples to “cooperators” in Ecuador, the Central African Republic, and Borneo whom he trusts to keep the plants safe and not let them fall into greedy hands. He also regularly ships seeds to correspondents all over the world whose motives he deems honorable.
This precautionary insurance is standard procedure at botanical gardens, according to John Kress, the head of botany at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Kress met Carle more than a decade ago on a collecting trip and has frequently exchanged plants with him. “I respect what Alan is trying to do,” Kress says. “I think the goal of saving secondary species of commercially exploited plants is admirable.” What troubles him is the lack of formal cataloging and ongoing scientific studies. “I’m concerned about the long-term viability of a place that’s dependent on the vision of a single person and his dream,” he adds. The question, he says, is whether the Carles can “groom” the garden “and turn it over to the next generation.”
Fortunately, the kind of help the Carles would welcome may be on the way. Last October, they traveled to Bologna to receive the prestigious Slow Food Award, the first in what will be an annual series that the Italian-based organization intends to be the Nobel of biodiversity. The awards received international publicity, and scores of individuals and groups have since been in touch offering proposals, some of them income-generating. New friends are also coming to the Ark through its Web site, botanicalark.com, and the couple are about to publish a lush book on the garden’s history that will surely win them new support.
For now, Alan and Susan Carle keep working and collecting and devising new schemes to maintain their independence. Sometimes this requires as much hope as ingenuity. But doubt is not among the obstacles they face. Alan describes the search for an exceedingly rare fruit that had long tantalized him and a collecting friend in Ecuador—and eluded them both. On the last afternoon of a recent trip to that country, he headed off into what he calls “a magical forest.” Within a couple of hours, he found what he’s sure was the only ripe example of the fruit in the entire forest. “It’s times like that,” he says, “when I know somebody’s on my side.”
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