The Island of the Colorblind

And it was at Kew that I finally saw living cycads, clustered as they had been for a century or more in a corner of the great Palm House.[80] They too were survivors from a long-distant past, and the stamp of their ancientness was manifest in every part of them – in their huge cones, their sharp, spiny leaves, their heavy columnar trunks, reinforced like medieval armor, by persistent leaf bases. If the tree ferns had grace, these cycads had grandeur and, to my boyish mind, a sort of moral dimension too. Widespread once, reduced now to a few genera – I could not help thinking of them as both tragic and heroic. Tragic in that they had lost the premodern world they had grown up in: all the plants they were intimately related to – the seed ferns, the Bennettites, the Cordaites of the Paleozoic – had long ago vanished from the earth, and now they found themselves rare, odd, singular, anomalous, in a world of little, noisy, fast-moving animals and fast-growing, brightly colored flowers, out of synch with their own dignified and monumental timescale. But heroic too, in that they had survived the catastrophe which destroyed the dinosaurs, adapted to different climates and conditions (not least to the hegemony of birds and mammals, which the cycads now exploited to disperse their seeds).

The sense of their enduringness, their great phylogenetic age, was amplified for me by the age of some of the individual plants – one, an African Encephalartos longifolius, was said to be the oldest potted plant in Kew and had been brought here in 1775. If these wonders could be grown at Kew, I thought, why should I not grow them at home? When I was twelve (the war had just ended) I took the bus to a nursery in Edmonton, in north London, and bought two plants – a woolly tree fern, a Ci-botium, and a small cycad, a Zamia.[81] I tried to grow them in our little glassed-in conservatory at the back of the house – but the house was too cold, and they withered and died.

When I was older, and first visited Amsterdam, I discovered the beautiful little triangular Hortus Botanicus there – it was very old, and still had a medieval air, an echo of the herb gardens, the monastery gardens, from which botanical gardens had sprung. There was a conservatory which was particularly rich in cycads, including one ancient, gnarled specimen, contorted with age (or perhaps from its confinement in a pot and a small space), which was (also) said to be the oldest potted plant in the world. It was called the Spinoza cycad (though I have no idea whether Spinoza ever saw it), and it had been potted, if the information was reliable, near the middle of the seventeenth century; it vied, in this way, with the ancient cycad at Kew.[82]

But there is an infinite difference between a garden, however grand, and the wild, where one can get a feeling of the actual complexities and dynamics of life, the forces that press to evolution and extinction. And I yearned to see cycads in their own context, not planted, not labelled, not isolated for viewing, but growing side by side with banyans and screw pines and ferns all about them, the whole harmony and complexity of a full-scale cycad jungle – the living reality of my childhood dreamscape.

Rota is Guam’s closest companion in the Marianas chain and is geologically similar, with a complex history of risings and fallings, reef makings and destructions, going back forty million years or so. The two islands are inhabited by similar vegetation and animals – but Rota, lacking Guam’s size, its grand harbors, its commercial and agricultural potential, has been far less modernized. Rota has been largely left to itself, biologically and culturally, and it can perhaps give one some idea of how Guam looked in the sixteenth century, when it was still covered by dense forests of cycads, and this was why I wanted to come here.[83]

I would be meeting one of the island’s few remaining medicine women, Beata Mendiola – John Steele had known her, and her son Tommy, for many years. ‘They know more about cycads, about all the primitive plants and foods and natural medicines and poisons here,’ he said, ‘than anyone I know.’ They met me at the landing strip – Tommy is an engaging, intelligent man in his late twenties or early thirties, fluent in Chamorro and English. Beata, lean, dark, with an aura of power, was born during the Japanese occupation, and speaks Chamorro and Japanese only, so Tommy had to interpret for us.

We drove a few miles down a dirt road to the edge of the jungle and then went on by foot, Tommy and his mother with machetes, leading the way. The jungle was so dense in places that light could hardly filter through, and I had the sense, at times, of a fairy wood, with every tree trunk, every branch, wreathed in epiphytic mosses and ferns.