Risking His Own Extinction to Rescue the Rarest of Flowers
Briefly

"It's not that I am that daring, said Carlos Magdalena, a research horticulturalist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London. These situations just arise, and they are not like Superman extreme. Sometimes it's more Peter Sellers than Indiana Jones."
"Mr. Magdalena's main responsibility at Kew Gardens is tending tropical plants. But he is also known as the plant messiah, as anointed by a Spanish newspaper in 2010, for his work rescuing several plant species from the brink of extinction."
"Imagine what happens when the God calls you the messiah, he said, standing outside one of the graceful greenhouses at Kew Gardens."
"It is appropriate that Mr. Magdalena's star moment in the documentary showed him working with lilies, the plant closest to his heart and the first one he grew as an 8-year-old on his parent's finca, a plot of land in the Asturias region of northern Spain."
Read at www.nytimes.com
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