Backyard conservation

The British passion for plants is legendary.  Nowadays this passion mostly is manifest in the ubiquity of well tended gardens and one of the biggest and most famous flower shows in the world.  But at the height of the British Empire, it also took the form of a massive army of global plant collectors that fed unique and potentially useful plants into a vast network of botanical gardens and plant improvement stations.  This was in a very practical sense another arm of Imperial power that among other things helped facilitate colonial expansion and the slave trade.

But a recent study reports that another legacy of this history is that UK gardens are now home to many Japanese species (such as Magnolia stellata pictured above) which are under threat in their native land.  It's sort of  like finding a lost Picasso in your attic.  I have often thought that home gardens could be utilized as a sort of decentralized repository of rare plants.  But of course, this brings up a whole host of questions related to the goal and purpose of plant conservation...