With the promise of travel, adventure and the chance to follow in the footsteps of Charles Darwin, applications have opened for what may be the best job in the natural world: a expedition botanist to go on plant collecting adventures for the Cambridge University Botanic Garden.
It is understood to be the first time such a post has been offered by a British botanic garden in modern history. “This is very unusual – there was no template for this,” says Samuel Brockington, professor of evolutionary biology and curator at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden (CUBG).
Expeditions will be the main focus of the role, which pays up to £44,263 per annum. Applicants are expected to be keen botanists with an appropriate undergraduate degree, a passion for travel, an intrepid spirit – and the ability to identify a new or interesting plant species growing in the wild.
“So many people love the opportunity to travel, and see different landscapes and experience different cultures, and the world of botany is a fantastic lens through which to do that,” Brockington said.
It’s an opportunity to see how plants change around the world, he said, and offers keen taxonomists the chance to do vital plant conservation work and help curate CUBG’s living collection of about 8,000 plant species. “So many plant species are threatened with extinction. By going out, taking seeds, recording these plants and bringing them back to collections and seed banks, you are doing very important work.”
Although this is the first time CUBG has offered such a role, in 1831 its founder, Prof John Stevens Henslow, recommended his former student, 22-year-old Charles Darwin, for the post of gentleman naturalist on board HMS Beagle. Darwin then married posted more than 1,000 plant specimens back to his old tutor, to help him build the Cambridge botanical museum collection.
While Henslow, a natural theologian, was gathering new and diverse plant species from around the world to demonstrate the infinite scope of God’s creation, today CUBG seeks to protect the diversity of its cutting-edge collection and respond to the climate emergency .
In July 2019, the garden officially recorded what was then the highest UK temperature – 38.7C – and then, just three years later, the temperature reached 39.9C as a new UK record of 40.3C was set in Lincolnshire. “As good as we are horticulturists, many plants don’t make it year after year, so we maintain the diversity of the collection by bringing in about 500 to 1,000 batches of plants a year,” Brockington said. “A lot of our current thinking is about how we can do this in a more sustainable way, by bringing in plants that make sense to grow in our environment.”
The successful applicant will be tasked with leading expeditions to collect data on the exact locations of new and biologically interesting plants growing in the wild, while also collecting seeds and cuttings that will enable the 40-acre botanical garden to preserve living specimens of these species for posterity.
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“We mostly focus on temperate hotspots in regions that are extremely diverse – Central Asia, the Balkans, South Africa and South America – and think about what we can bring back and grow here in Cambridge. So we’re looking at areas of the world where the climate is consistent with where we are now, or where we might be with climate change in the future,” said Brockington.
Ideally, applicants will be multilingual and have a “phenomenal knowledge of all the different plants”, rather than specializing in one in particular. He or she will also need to enjoy the camaraderie of working in a team and be happy camping in the wilderness for a month at a time, say in Kyrgyzstan.
“Field trips are really intense and incredibly hard work because you have a limited amount of time in these places,” Brockington said. “I think you have to have a real sense of adventure, love to travel and be comfortable working in different cultures.”
