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IRG 15 - a tale of Iris stocksii
Pacific Rim:
This article is highlighted in the March issue IRG 15
(http://www.srgc.org.uk/logs/logdir/2011Mar251301088655IRG15_March_2011.pdf )
and is published here in full.
The Taliban don’t give phytos:
How a special iris was spirited from Afghanistan
By Paige Woodward
In the small hours of February 22, 2010, I was dozily playing computer Scrabble when an
email with attachments landed.
From: Juan Piek, Deputy Security Co-ordinator, Kajaki Dam.
“Hi there. I am a South African currently working in Helmand province in Afghanistan and I
have come across a plant that I cannot identify other than that it is an
Iris species. I had a look at your site after spending many hours on the internet … It is
currently in bloom after some rain we had. I hope it’s a new species that I discovered —
what’s the chance!”
What a beautiful plant. It was clearly a Juno — a bulbous iris of subgenus Scorpiris, native
to dry western and Central Asia. But which? All images here are copyright A.J. (Andre
Juan) Piek, by the way, with a few, noted exceptions.
I trolled through Brian Mathew’s descriptions of Junos in A Guide to Species Irises; saw that
I knew too little to make headway; fired Juan’s images off to a couple of irisarian friends
for their opinions; and asked Juan for more details. Elevation? Soil type? Companions? Juan
kept feeding me information when he had time.
On the pic above, Juan is pointing at the Iris. The lake behind him was formed by the Helmand
River backed up behind the Kajaki Dam.
At first I withheld Juan’s identity and location,
for his privacy and safety. But he doesn’t care whether his name is out there. This is Juan
Piek’s story, really. I am just the intermediary.
Pacific Rim:
You’d think images like these Juan took would be restricted in time of war, but similar
ones are already on the Internet, some of them officially posted by coalition forces.
The dam, about 160 km (100 miles) NW of Kandahar, supplies both electricity and irrigation
to a wide area of SW Afghanistan. Farmers in this parched region use water to grow
poppies for the opium trade, yes, but food crops, too: wheat, fruits and vegetables. The
dam also supplies crucial water to Iran. Begun in the 1950s with American aid, it remains
incomplete, but it’s an obvious military target.
Here is the lake seen from a helicopter.
The map is from Wikipedia. It shows the Helmand River, Kandahar and Kabul, but not the Kajaki Dam, unfortunately. The dam is on the Helmand in the foothills of the mountains, easy to find in Google Maps or Google Earth.
Pacific Rim:
This is the dry terrain around the dam, eroded by the river. Taliban and coalition forces
sometimes clash nearby. Landmines abound, left over from the Russian occupation of 1979-
1988. The Mujahideen were anti-Marxist freedom fighters, armed mainly by western
powers, only to morph (some of them) into the Taliban. Like so much else, it’s
complicated. Just: here and there one finds an abandoned Russian tank; only some areas
have been cleared of landmines; this is no place for a picnic.
My irisarian friends couldn’t identify the iris. Neither is strictly a Juno expert.
In the whole world there are only a few Juno experts. I made a short list and emailed
five: “If the ID is super-obvious, let us all have a good laugh. If the iris is interesting, this
fellow would be pleased to send you samples.”
It’s so hard to be expert. You have to be adroit on the monkeybars of botany; incessantly
curious; hyper-observant, noticing what has not been seen before; well informed, with
access to the latest data fresh, before publication. You also have to be hard to bamboozle
with shoddy molecular work; and it helps to be a good grower. And never sleep.
Here are the five:
• Tony Hall, the foremost expert on Junos; he retired as head of Kew’s alpine unit
and is now an honorary research associate working on a monograph of Junos.
• Arnis Seisums, botanist and plant explorer, of Salaspils Botanic Garden in Latvia;
he is collaborating with Tony on the Junos monograph.
• Brian Mathew, former chief botanist at Kew; monographer extraordinaire of
geophytes.
• Carol Wilson, Research Assistant Professor at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden
and Claremont Graduate University in California; she is working on the molecular
phylogeny of Iris and has collected Junos in the Middle East.
• Jim Almond, proprietor of the website Alpines for the Enthusiast, and co-holder
with Kew of the UK’s national collection of Junos.
Brian Mathew was first to reply.
“Dear Paige
”Nothing to laugh about! This is a superb photo of Iris stocksii (Baker)
Boissier, a 'Juno' Iris described by Baker in 1876. It is widespread in the
south and east of Afghanistan and on into southern Pakistan. Although it has
been collected many times — mostly as dried specimens in herbaria — it has
never been cultivated to any great extent so seeds would be very welcome —
should be ripe about May I imagine. Do tell your correspondent to be careful
— no plant is worth getting your foot blown off for!
Could you ascertain if he would be happy for a note to appear in the Iris
Species Group's newsletter?
Many thanks for sending this on, it is exciting.”
The others chimed in: it’s stocksii.
Tony Hall: “This iris is extremely exciting, especially as I have been studying this group
(the "junos" or more properly Iris subgenus Scorpiris) for over 30 years and this plant has
not been in cultivation during that time period. I feel sure this is Iris stocksii, quite
widespread in Afghanistan and also occurring over the border in adjacent Pakistan. The
only other possibility is I. odontostyla, a more restricted Afghan species but superficially
quite similar....but I am inclined towards the former. I would be overjoyed to receive
either bulbs (they would need to be dug up very carefully, the fragile roots kept intact if
possible and stored/mailed dry and protected from crushing in paper, not a polythene
bag), seeds or even a dried specimen in flower.”
Home addresses quietly blossomed beneath the gods’ signatures.
Juan and his friends were giddy, too. “It’s so exciting getting this mail, friends and family
and co-workers, even the locals are waiting for this outcome and feedback.”
Pacific Rim:
I did consider the legality of removing plant material from a foreign land without
permission, and discussed it with Juan. But the iris is not rare, the populaton at the dam is
far more threatened by war than by the trowel, and as far as I know, the Taliban don’t give
phytosanitary certificates. I told all concerned that if there is a problem, I am not a
botanical garden, and I will take the hit.
Here is Juan again. One of the security firm’s two interpreters accompanies Juan all day.
The interpreter was given a camera. “After I looked at his photos … I noticed the flower in
the background.”
The rainy season — more properly, the period when any moisture falls at all — begins in
November and ends in early March. It rained for several days in January. The iris emerged
quickly, then bloomed. Juan found it “on several mountains around the dam wall” at 1036
– 2000 m (3400-3600 ft.). He noticed few insects there, even under rocks: might the iris
be wind-pollinated?
Pacific Rim:
“The soil is fine with a clay base keeping it moist for quite some time after
the rain. The soil is shallow, some places only couple of inches deep and there are some
mosses growing on rocks close to the plant.”
By mid-March the iris was going to seed, just as many other plants, and fruit trees, were
coming into bloom.
Among the other plants Juan found were Hyoscyamus sp.(above),
a Prunus of some kind (above),
and an Astragalus (above). Brian Mathew identified these plants.
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