Confiscated Plants Get Second Life
U.S. Customs officials confiscate many smuggled plants at ports of entry, mostly orchids as well as cacti and succulents. Many of those plants get a second life at designated Plant Rescue Centers, like the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C.
Originally published Oct. 7, 2013
UPDATE: Are Traders and Traffickers WInning the Orchid Battle?
BILL MCLAUGHLIN, PLANT CURATOR, U.S. BOTANIC GARDEN:
Plant smuggling is a time, dishonored tradition. There weren't many regulations a long time ago and a lot of people had to come up to speed and realize just how regulated plants are now.
KYLE WALLICK, BOTANIST, U.S. BOTANIC GARDEN:
All plants are required to have proper paperwork coming through ports of call into this country. We receive plants that have been seized through the custom officials and the Fish and Wildlife Service at international airports, seaports and international borders. And a lot of that is to protect agricultural crops from foreign pathogens. Some plants are actively collected.
BILL MCLAUGHLIN, PLANT CURATOR, U.S. BOTANIC GARDEN:
All of it is driven by demand. So if something is slow growing, rare, recently discovered-those are the hot items. So all the plant collectors really want to have those plants, they may or may not think very carefully about where they came from.
KYLE WALLICK, BOTANIST, U.S. BOTANIC GARDEN:
Things like orchids and cacti and succulents are two of the main categories that fall under this situation.
BILL MCLAUGHLIN, PLANT CURATOR, U.S. BOTANIC GARDEN:
We're contacted by the Fish and Wildlife Service. They usually give us a vague description and a number of plants that they have available. The confiscated plants that we receive have come from primarily South America and Southeast Asia.
When we've gotten some big cardboard boxes with just one or two really big cacti, you can see where the root system went into a rock crevice and where it was chopped out with a machete. There kind of an emotional response because I look at that plant and say, "You've been on Earth longer than I have, and someone just hacked you out of the ground and shipped you off to someone to turn a buck." Those are the ones that kind of get to me and me feel like we're really doing something worthwhile here.
When we're secure that the plants we have are healthy and in good care, we send them uptown for display and actually that's a great chance for us to educate the public to think about the life of a plant in the wild, it has a story, it's plugged into a greater web of life, and this is our chance to tell people that story.
