FEATURED PROJECTS:
Himalayas: Medicinal Plants
Denzil will never forget the first meeting he had with the Chairman of the world’s largest Ayurvedic medicine company.
It took place in what could only be described as a palace in Regents Park Terrace, The owner’s summer house in London. Ashok was dressed in an immaculate white cotton dhoti and leather slippers. Humble, generous and with razor sharp intelligence. He said he wanted to leave something behind for posterity that went beyond business. Because of his love of the plants of the mountains where he was brought up he wanted to build a nursery for endangered Himalayan Plants as well as a place to produce Yew trees for the company’s then secret project involving the anti-cancer drug Taxol. Ashok moreover made it very clear he did not want just any old greenhouse but one that was more advanced than anyone in that part of the world had ever seen.Thus began a three year journey that took Denzil right across northern India and up into the Himalayas to start work on one of the least know and most ambitious medicinal plant conservation projects in the world.
The Greenwave nursery in Banepa, Nepal was a fully automated fibreglass greenhouse whose temperature, water supply and fertiliser regime could be controlled by a computer sited anywhere in the world.
Not only did it produce nearly 1.5 million Taxus seedlings as part of a forest enrichment programme agreed with the Government of Nepal it also grew many endangered medicinals like Saussurea Lappa that most experts said could never be propagated in a greenhouse. Its owner spent hours and hours with Denzil and his American greenhouse expert visiting equipment manufacturers and forest nurseries in Holland, UK, Isreal and USA. He wanted only the best, and he wanted to know every detail of how it worked. Moreover he sent a whole army of agronomists from his company research foundation outside Delhi to source endangered medicinal from right across the region and trial them at Banepa.
The story sadly does not have a happy ending as Chinese backed Naxalite terrorists soon after the fall of the King of Nepal somehow learnt the location of the greenhouse and damaged it severely.
The owner died some years later and his successors sadly decided not to rebuild this magnificent facility.