Thank this primitive plant for apples!

Amborella trichopoda

Family: Amborellaceae
Genus: Amborella
Species: trichopoda

This month’s featured plant isn’t one that you’ll encounter at a Master Gardener clinic. You won’t find it at even the most well-stocked garden center in town. In fact, you would have to travel quite a distance to take a look at Amborella trichopoda. Even if you did stumble across it—highly unlikely—you would probably not consider it worth placing in your landscape. Its appearance is really quite undistinguished. Then why, you’re asking, would I write about it? Because Amborella trichopoda has one attribute that makes it perhaps the most interesting plant of all. It has survived for at least 130 million years. It is generally acknowledged to be the oldest angiosperm on earth—the most primitive flowering plant alive today.

Fossilized remnants of an even older flowering plant, dating back 142 million years, have been found in China; but neither this long-dead species nor Amborella trichopoda has solved what Charles Darwin called the “abominable mystery”: the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the fossil record. While research is progressing, paleobotanists, evolutionary plant biologists, and other specialists still do not know which nonflowering plant sprouted the very first flower…or why, or when. But had that flower not appeared, it would be a very different world today. David Dilcher, a biology professor at the University of Florida, says that if early flowering plants had not been successful, “there would have been no apples, no Wheaties in the morning, no corn on the cob, no potatoes, no rice or other grains.” All of the plant food sources we depend on today came into existence after plants evolved the ability to make flowers that attracted insects and other pollinators and then grew into fruit. Many of us pursue with diligence the production of a few perfect tulips or roses, or the nicest beets or fava beans. As we prepare to scrabble in the dirt, we might take a moment to appreciate the intricate, evolutionary processes that made possible all of the choices we find in our seed catalogs each year. Flowers came along not to brighten our days, but rather to entice the creatures, great and small, that had the ability to do the thing the plant cannot do: move around. Our enjoyment of the blossoms and the subsequent fruit may be the motivation for us, but it is of little consequence to the plant!

While we ponder the mysteries of our own gardens, Amborella trichopoda just keeps growing in its native setting on the South Pacific island of New Caledonia. . It is a small shrub with tiny greenish-yellow flowers and red fruit. In 1975, specimens were brought back to the arboretum at the University of California at Santa Cruz, at the request of its founding director. He fussed over them and a few survived. Today, UCSC is the only source of A. trichopoda in the United States. Pamela and Douglas Soltis, botanists at our own Washington State University, collected samples in New Caledonia for their genetic research on the status of A. trichopoda as the oldest living angiosperm, which was reported at the International Botanical Congress in St. Louis last summer. They were on one of four research teams, working independently, to come to the same conclusion.

March is a bit of a breather in our annual gardening calendar. Many seeds have been started; and perhaps some bare-root roses or fruit trees have been planted, but here in the Northwest, we gardeners have a few moments to reflect on the nature of plants, and why we find the cultivation of them so satisfying. We can consider the ancestors of the plants we grow today, and reflect on the importance of biological diversity. As Master Gardeners, we are trained to practice stewardship and responsible gardening practices. So as plants awaken in this latest chapter in an ancient cycle, we can applaud our efforts, even as we realize that plants flowered before us, and they will continue to flower after we’ve gone. It is a privilege to do what we can to nurture them, while we’re here.