On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 7:51 AM, Paul Licht <plicht@berkeley.edu> wrote: > If you have valuable plants with provenance that you are willing to > share, we would love to work with you. > Paul > > This seems like a one way offer for the plant material to move. Is the reciprocal phrase also true..... .....If We have valuable plants with provenance that you are willing to grow, we would love to work with you. ..... Probably not. I do understand restrictions imposed on Botanical Gardens that make it impossible for them to disseminate non native material without compensation being remitted to country of origin, but it makes it frustrating when they have rare plants and it is only ever available to other researchers and non private Botanical Gardens that they classify as worthy. I also understand how plant material grown from seed to flowering and then seed again in a garden whether mine or a botanical garden has started the process of selection away from its natural environmental conditions. Only those "tolerant" of my growing conditions will produce the next generation, others die off. But even so the plant genetics is not lost totally as it would be if left to fade away over the next 50 years in its natural settings with no intervention of cloning existing material and making it publicly available. For example the latest government report on Lilium occidentale gives it about 35-50 years remaining in its natural habitat, but laws make it illegal to grow, propagate or disseminate any plants, seeds, tissue cultures etc. From what I have heard, there isn't even any effort to pollinate isolated plants in a locality with each other to aid seed development. It seems to me more could be done in a pro active mode rather that monitor populations from year to year and report on the steady decline of the population until extinct. I understand I am talking about two different things above with Botanical Gardens as one and natural plant population decline a second. But Botanical Gardens could be the intermediary between government restrictions on native population collecting and commercial growers, collectors and plant societies making the material available. This would take collecting pressure off native plant areas. For example Orchids that were selling for $5000 each years ago now are available for $5-10, Similarly for plants like Nepenthes rajah, 20 years ago priceless, today medium sized plants for less that $20-30. Michael