Seed and Bulb Exchanges, some Comments

I haven't yet heard some really good reasons why seeds of rare and
endangered species should not be grown by hobbyists.
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The seed exchanges I was thinking of when I said that seeds of
endangered plants shouldn't be offered on them are the ones that have
over 5000 seed offerings each year. The seeds go out in order of the
request being received, donors first. There is no guarantee that the
people receiving the seeds will be able to grow them.

Thank you Diane for qualifying your remarks. They make more sense to me
now. (Plus your additional comments in your email seem very reasonable
to me.)

NARGS (North American Rock Garden Society) will not list seed of
endangered plants. I don't know what happens if such seed is
donated. Perhaps it is given to a botanic garden, which is what
happens when CITES listed plants are discovered by Customs inspectors.

This very last point has been bothering me ever since the last time I
brought some plants back with me from abroad (with permits and phytos
and everything), and while the LAX Customs agent was taking them away
from me to be inspected (and picked up the next day), I asked him what
they did with plants that people brought back with them without all the
permits. He said they would either destroy them or turn them over to a
place designated to receive illegally imported plant material. I
somewhat shockedly asked if they destroyed endangered or nearly extinct
plants just because they were brought in illegally. He tried to assure
me that no, they would turn those over to the proper people. When I
further inquired who that might be and what they did with the plants
(like rare orchids for example), he said that usually they gave those
plants to the L.A. Zoo and the Zoo planted them in their gardens
throughout the zoo.

Now I'm curious just why the L.A. Zoo would be better prepared and
knowledgeable enough to grow any random rare plant that shows up, than
anyone else including specialist hobbyists would be? And if all these
confiscated plants are planted somewhere, even if they were turned over
to better qualified places such as the Huntington or the San Diego Zoo
for that matter, where are they and how can we find out what they are
and where they're planted in order to see them? And in the case of rare
orchids for example, who gets them? If someone tried to illegally bring
a Worsleya back from Brazil with them and it got confiscated, who would
end up with it and what would they do with it? It's not like any
professional plant person or botanist here in California is really
going to know how to grow it better than the top experts (but still
merely hobbyists) on the Worsleya email list who have actually
successfully grown them. In fact, I would bet there isn't any
professional botanist or other official botanical professional here in
California who knows better how to grow them than the best hobbyist
growers in Australia do. I think the botanical officials here would
stand a good chance of killing it.

Anyway, since I've never seen anything particularly rare or really
unusual that is CITES listed that no one else has at either the L.A.
Zoo or at the Huntington or the L.A. Arboretum, they're either
permanently keeping them out of sight so that only the professionals
who work there, and their friends, ever get to see them, or they're
losing them just as much as we mere hobbyist would if we tried to grow
them on. Furthermore, now that the plant is here anyway, why don't they
propagate it in some way, by cloning or seeds or division, and get it
out there so that bad people don't keep trying to smuggle them in and
decimate the native populations? Just wondering.

End of gripe session.
;-)

--Lee Poulsen
Pasadena, California, USDA Zone 10a