Civilisation owes a debt to Jordan and its dryland plants, which are being preserved in a new botanical garden that may play a vital part in our future too.

The garden, which is the brainchild of Princess Basma bint Ali of Jordan, is being developed on a 180-hectare site near Amman.

It aims to preserve and showcase plants that are native to the Middle Eastern country. These plants include the wild ancestors of food crops such as wheat, barley, oats, garlic, onion, lentils, pistachios, almonds and apricots.
Jordan has a rich biodiversity, with some 2,000 plant species distributed across oak and pine forests, and a range of ecosystems found in the Jordan valley such as the Azraq desert oasis. It was these dryland plants that enabled civilisation to evolve and spread out from the Middle East.

Centuries of cultivation means that the plants grown as staples in the west today are genetically less diverse than their wild ancestors. As a result, they can be nutritionally inferior, susceptible to disease and less able to adapt to climatic changes.

As climate change takes hold, knowing how to preserve these same wild food stocks may prove vital to sustaining current human populations.

“We haven't yet attributed much importance to preserving the biodiversity of crop wild relatives,” said Joachim Gratzfeld, the director of regional programmes for Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI).
“However, many wild crop species are important because they originated in drylands, with extreme climatic conditions. As a result, they are able to tolerate dry places. If we assume that the climate will become dryer in the future, these plants will have a vital role to play in maintaining food security.”
The site at Tel Al Rumman was chosen for the location of the Royal botanic garden because it encompasses a range of habitats and has an elevation range of 300m.

“The site was originally an oak forest so the oak forest habitat will be easy to recreate,” Princess Basma told Guardian Unlimited environment.

“With the other habitats, we are going to study the ecology of each one and then introduce the relevant plants. For example, to replicate the Dana highland habitat we would use the Juniperus phoenicia tree as the design theme and then bring in the associated plants to create the whole ecosystem.”
Each habitat area will contain a pavilion providing information on the characteristic plants, their uses and why we need to conserve them. There will also be nurseries, a herbarium, plus research and educational facilities.
The princess hopes the garden project will map and document native species, identify those that are endangered and grow them in the garden.

A second role will be to work with neighbouring countries to draw up plans for conserving valuable plants across the Arab world.

The gardens also aim to promote better management of rangeland areas across the country. These zones are where many wild grassland crop species once thrived but increased grazing, urban encroachment and overuse of freshwater sources have combined to reduce their extent and biodiversity.

“You get a cycle of overgrazing so there aren't as many plants, once that happens it doesn't rain so much and you get soil erosion,” explained Princess Basma. “We're going to adopt strategies to reverse the process.”
In time, the idea is to build up stocks of living, genetically diverse plants that are useful to humans. These will supplement stores of seeds such as those held in the UK's Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place.
“You never really know how long your specimens will last and you have to use so much technology to preserve these seeds,” said Princess Basma. “So it's best to have both seed stores and live specimens.”

Princess Basma's ambition to open a botanical garden in Jordan was inspired at a young age, when she accompanied her father to gardens around the world.

“I've always loved plants but there was never a resource centre that could teach me about our native species,” she said. “My parents would take me to see plants in the wild but when we went back to the gardens in different residential houses they would always be planted with exotics. That instilled the first seed for the idea of setting up a garden specifically to showcase native species so we can learn more about them.”

Princess Basma spoke to Guardian Unlimited last month while visiting the UK as the guest of honour for the 20th anniversary of BGCI. In 2005, a BGCI donation of £300,000 from HSBC bank's Investing in Nature programme got the project off the ground.

The Ministry of Agriculture then donated land worth 460million Jordanian dinars (£315m). The gardens are expected to cost a further £24m before their doors open in the next few years.

Guardian Unlimited