But ‘Some Twit’ Destroyed Wurzell’s Wormwood : British Botanist Discovers New Hybrid

Wurzell’s Wormwood didn’t count for much when it was alive in the wild, but it’s at the center of a controversy now that it’s gone.

“Something that’s completely new to the world, in its only locality, just wasn’t looked after,” lamented Brian Wurzell, the plant’s discoverer.

Wurzell’s wormwood, Artemisia wurzellii , was the pride and joy of the ecological consultant and botanist who in August, 1987, discovered it growing on a 2-square-yard plot in a park in north London. His instincts told him it was something new, and tests at Leicester University proved him right.

He reported his discovery to the authority that runs the park, “and I assumed from then on that the plant would be safeguarded,” Wurzell said. On a recent visit to the site, “I found to my horror it had been dumped on. It was no longer there.”

The loss is also mourned by Clive Stace, a botany professor at Leicester University and president of the Botanical Society of the British Isles.

“This was notified to the people in charge of this site,” said Stace. “They agreed that it was interesting and they agreed to look after it and not harm it, and then some twit dumped something on it.”

Sino-British Hybrid

A. wurzellii was a hybrid of two common species, one native to Britain, the other Chinese. Such hybrids aren’t rare; the 2,500 flowering plant species found in the British Isles have spawned some 700 hybrids, he said.

But Wurzell’s discovery piqued botanists’ interest because of its unusual genesis--its parents normally flower at different times of the year. “These two things must have flowered exceptionally, either the one early or the other late, and overlapped so that one could pollinate the other,” Stace said.

The result wasn’t much to look at.

“It’s a rather ugly, scruffy-looking green plant” with small brownish-greenish flowers, Stace said. “It is not at all attractive. Its interest is totally scientific as opposed to aesthetic.”

Like a Proud Parent

But Wurzell, like a proud parent, saw some beauty in the botanical mongrel: “It’s not something you would grow in your garden to look pretty. But it had a dignity of its own.”

Leicester University botanists managed to cultivate a cutting from a small piece of root Wurzell sent them shortly after discovering the plant. But other than that, A. wurzellii is just a memory.

“It is extinct in the wild,” Wurzell said. He wants to know who to blame.

“I can’t point an accusing finger,” he said, “but it looks as though the contractors of a nearby road simply spread lots of soil . . . having no idea that there was anything there that shouldn’t have been dumped on.”

The Lea Valley Regional Park Authority promises to get to the root of things. But an official, who insisted on anonymity, cautioned, “It might be nothing to do with road construction at all.

What Might Have Been

Meanwhile, botanists can only wonder what might have been.

“If you destroy something, you don’t know what you’ve lost,” Stace said. Wurzell’s wormwood might even have had commercial potential, he said, noting that it comes from the strongly scented Artemisia genus.

But even if it was ugly and useless, it’ll be missed.

“It’s like a big jigsaw,” Stace said. “You might say you’ve got a jigsaw of a thousand pieces, so it doesn’t really matter if you lose one, you’ve only lost one in a thousand. But it does spoil the jigsaw, doesn’t it?”