2024 Year End Appeal
Holding the Positives Aloft

With these challenging times, it seems appropriate for our annual Year End Appeal to dig a little deeper into the mindset that is the underpinning of Far Reaches Botanical Conservancy. For those of us who love nature and the plants that clothe it, it can be hard not to doom spiral into the seemingly daily twin escalating threats of climate change and unfettered resource exploitation. In the last two years, we have personally observed the impacts of this to alpine areas in Andean Patagonia, the Himalaya in Sikkim, the Tian Shan in Kyrgyzstan, and above tree line in our nearby Olympic Mountains.


As plant empaths, personally seeing the effects of humanity on the alpine zone, one of the most impacted and least adaptable biomes, has been a weight we carry. We know this degradation won’t be confined to the alpine zone but will affect all ecosystems going forward. Ignoring what is happening is something we personally and as an organization cannot do, but how to cope with the Weight of Knowing is something we all must find within ourselves.

The gratitude we at Far Reaches Botanical Conservancy have for our members and donors goes a long way to lessening the burdensome Weight and continually propels us forward. Indeed, we feel that with each new plant added to the safe harbor of the collection, we are making amends and nurturing hope. We cannot thank you enough.

We are in it for the long haul. While we necessarily have to prioritize immediate or near-term objectives, the overall framework is based on the future of coming decades while looking into the next century. But how can we best ensure that FRBC will remain secure and resilient while continuing to be a robust steward of threatened plant species and their irreplaceable genetics?

What keeps us sane in the deluge of often despair-inducing news and events, is the goal of expanding the FRBC collection in the best possible manner. The FRBC collection numbers in the thousands of taxa, the numbers of which outstrip many botanical gardens significantly larger in physical size and infrastructure.




We have used nearly all our available garden space for planting out parts of the collection while the majority remains in containers. To maximize security and resilience while providing optimal conditions for the FRBC collection, we recognize the need for serious endowments to acquire property and infrastructure on the Olympic Peninsula with adequate staffing to ensure the growth and perpetuation of the envisioned Far Reaches Botanical Refugium. Our current site will then remain as the propagation and production hub as well as hosting display gardens and events.

This is an ambitious ask as it will take millions of dollars, but the payback is enormous. When we earlier spoke of the irreplaceable genetics, the majority of the plants in the FRBC collection hold many secrets in their DNA with the potential to benefit humanity. We often imagine a future scenario where our native flora is no longer an optimal food source for pollinators due to stress or altered flowering times due to climate change, and some of our non-native species bridge that gap keeping key pollinators going.





The plants we steward come to us by various means. A primary introduction route is via our own wild collections with provenance data. Examples are the first introduction to cultivation (we believe) of Chuquiraga calchaquina and a rare introduction of the recently described (2006) small but precocious Magnolia amabilis. We value plants from wild collections by others such as Rhododendron pseudochrysanthum (top of page) from Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones 1993 trip to Taiwan where it is now regarded as vulnerable in the wild. We are uncertain if this collection is still in cultivation beyond this one plant. Another such example is this Pyrrosia matsudae which Adam Black shared with us some years ago from his collection in Taiwan. Adam visited earlier this year and was moved to see his plant thriving here as he had lost his and to his knowledge, others he had shared had also perished. Of course we shared back with him. Another avenue of introduction is from cultivation overseas of plants new to North America. From Aberconwy Nursery in Wales, we brought home two of their introductions -- Androsace sarmentosum subsp. primuloides 'Conwy Gem' and Androsace sarmentosum subsp. primuloides 'Conwy Jewel'.



Planning for the Future

Humanity apparently is unwilling to embrace the universal changes required to slow or halt the inevitable. Personally, for us to be able to look in the mirror each morning, we need to know we have done the best we can do. That best has coalesced into creating the Far Reaches Botanical Refugium, a literal lending library of rare plant resources for research, education, species preservation, and the furthering of the pleasure plants give to us in our gardens.

It is only with your help that this vision can be realized. Thank you.

Sue Milliken & Kelly Dodson
(shown here in Patagonia, 2024)