Chengdu, October 8 (Xinhua) -- On the campus of Leshan Normal College in Sichuan Province, the fruits of several trees swayed with the wind like small scales, "Its flowers are white and light, like jasmine." "The Raleigh group talks about these plants, such as several family treasures.
In 1988, the Raleigh group discovered the plant, and because the fruit resembled a small scale hammer, he named it the flesh fruit scale hammer tree.
Stumble upon new species
The discovery of the fruit scale hammer tree was purely accidental.
In 1982, after graduating from the Raleigh Swarm Biology Major, he was assigned to teach at a school in Leshan. "In order to do a good job in teaching, I began to desperately investigate and understand the plants around Leshan." Luo Liqun recalled that every day as soon as he has time, he goes out to collect specimens, carries a backpack full of specimen holders and collection bags, walks more than 100 miles a day, can collect hundreds of specimens, and returns to dissect and identify the collected plant specimens.
This is the fruit of the pulp scale hammer tree. (Courtesy of the interviewee)
One day in 1988, As usual, Raleigh group went to the mountains near Leshan to investigate, and while searching the forest, he saw a tree with small white flowers like jasmine flowers in the distance, "up to ten, of which only a few flowers, although I was familiar with local plants at the time, but this plant has never been seen." He began to pay attention to the plant, and waited until the autumn of that year to finally collect the scale hammer-like fruit, and according to the fruit, it was designated as a plant of the benzoin family Scale Hammer Tree.
"At that time, there were several species of scale hammer trees in the genus Scale Hammer Tree, and it was not possible to determine whether this plant was a new species." Raleigh said.
The genus was the first new genus discovered and named by Chinese botanists. In 1928, the botanist Mr. Hu Xianhua named the scale hammer tree and the genus weigh hammer tree based on the specimen collected by Mr. Qin Renchang in Nanjing in 1927.
Therefore, Luo Liqun wrote a letter to the Nanjing Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at that time, hoping that the other party would mail a specimen of the scale hammer tree and compare it. "When I compare it, I find that it is very different, the other fruit is woody, relatively small, and the fruit I found is fleshy and juicy, relatively large." Raleigh was very excited.
He named this new plant the flesh and fruit scale hammer tree, and wrote the research results into a paper and sent it to the authoritative domestic journal. In 1992, the paper "A New Species of Sichuan Scale Hammer Tree" was published.
A long road to protection
When the Raleigh group discovered the flesh-and-fruit scale hammer tree, the seedlings and several flowering scale hammer trees added up to only 10 trees, and since then, the species has not been found in western China. The Raleigh group realized that if left unprotected, the plant could soon become extinct.
In 1998, Raleigh began artificial breeding of the pulp scale hammer tree in the small courtyard dam behind his father's house, and after 200 seeds were sown, there was no response the next year, and it was not until the third year that 6 seedlings germinated.
After the initial test, Raleigh Qun won a walled five-point plot of land through the school. 720 seeds were sown in 2000 and 322 seedlings were grown by 2002. Due to the thin soil of the planting ground, in order to improve the soil, he bought several truckloads of soil at his own expense, and a basket was carried into the ground to thicken the soil layer.
This is the flower of the flesh and fruit scale hammer tree. (Courtesy of the interviewee)
In the spring of the same year, Raleigh group also began to cut cuttings experiments, "made a large wooden box, which was cushioned with culture soil, made into an arch, covered with film and grass pads." "One of the keys to the success of cuttings is to control the temperature and humidity required for cuttings to take root and grow leaves," when the temperature is high, wet the grass pad, cover the wooden box to cool down, take it off at night, and open the film according to the humidity situation. ”
With the annual breeding, the number of plants continues to increase, and there are currently more than 400 plants. The school's land could not be planted, and the Raleigh Group began to rent land in the nearby countryside. The leased land has also gradually expanded from the initial five points of land to one acre, two acres, three acres...
Out of the conservation strategy, Raleigh Group also gave the successfully bred plants to a number of local units free of charge, so that the plants could enter the urban gardens and beautify the city.
From the first 10 to more than 400 now flowering and fruiting... The risk of extinction of the fruit scale hammer tree may be mitigated. However, Luo Liqun believes that the flesh and fruit scale hammer tree and several species of the entire scale hammer tree genus are still in a serious endangered state, and hopes that the relevant state departments will include the scale hammer tree in the "List of Wild Plants under National Key Protection" so that it can be better protected.
Luo Liqun said that human understanding of the natural world is gradually deepening, for human beings, some species may be useless now, but does not mean that they will be useless in the future, human beings are only one of the many species in nature, should be in harmony with other species.
Plant taxonomy requires painstaking efforts
Luo Liqun has always believed that to practice a good plant taxonomy skill, you need to go to nature and work hard.
When Luo Liqun was in school, his botany teacher was Qin Zisheng, a famous botanist in China. "Teacher Qin is very powerful in the wild, and she is my benchmark." Qin Zisheng once took them to Wolong for two weeks of internship, and as soon as she went to the wild, she went up the mountain with her leggings and could know a lot of plants.
Luo Liqun cultivates the flesh and fruit scale hammer tree at Leshan Normal College. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Zhang Hailei
After Luo Liqun became a teacher, he brought Qin Zisheng's teaching methods to the classroom and constantly reformed them.
"Botany is a practical discipline, and much of it is descriptive, such as what do flowers look like? What does the fruit look like? However, in the traditional theoretical teaching, students do not even see the structure of plants, and it is up to the teacher to speak empty to empty. ”
In Raleigh's classroom, an inquiry-based teaching model of "practice to theory" is adopted. In each class, he first did a lot of work before the class, going to the field to collect a large number of specimens of flowers, fruits, and leaves, and then the students each took a copy of it, and under the guidance of the teacher, they dissected and studied plants. At the time, Raleigh's two classes were filled with more than 100 people, and his refrigerator was almost full of specimens, sometimes traveling ten kilometers to collect plant material for class.
Nowadays, a phrase that Luo Liqun often hangs on his lips is "the wild is the world where I continue to study", and he hopes that more young people will devote themselves to plant classification research and protection of wild plants.