Why a Conservation Botanist Is Partnering with a Spice Company

Twenty Years in the Clouds

My first botanical expedition to the remote Eastern Himalayas was in 2002. That December, I traveled to nearly inaccessible areas of Talle Wildlife Sanctuary in India — Arunachal Pradesh's Lower Subansiri District; after crossing the Lebbya-Penggo Pass, our expedition team found no route forward.

We were forced to crawl four to five kilometers through dense, dark forest along narrow animal trails. The ground was thick with mud and insects. We went more than 36 hours without food due to supply shortages, surviving only by eating the edible fruits of Gaultheria brevistipes, a species I had just documented in the remote Talle Valley, the first record of it in India.

At the time, I was a young botanist with the Central National Herbarium at the Botanical Survey of India, scrambling up mist-shrouded slopes of East India in the Saramati Mountain in Nagaland, Dzongri in Sikkim, Lohit and Anjaw in Arunachal Pradesh, and the hills of Darjeeling, recording plants that had never appeared in any scientific literature.

Over the next two decades, I would discover ten species new to science — plants that had grown in these mountains for millennia, unknown beyond their forests. I received the K.S. Manilal National Award for Angiosperm Taxonomy. I became a reviewer for journals including Phytotaxa, Flora, Ecological Indicators, Forest & Trees, the Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge, the Journal of Threatened Taxa, and PLOS ONE. I watched my students become researchers in their own right.

But I also watched something else: the landscapes I studied were changing faster than I could document them.

A Quiet Extinction Crisis

The Eastern Himalaya is one of Earth's great mega-biodiversity hotspots — home to plants found nowhere else on the planet. It is also where some of India's most extraordinary teas and spices have grown for generations.

Botanists call northeast India the "cradle of flowering plants." The region harbors over 130 species of primitive angiosperms, more than 700 species of orchid, and roughly 3,500 plant species found nowhere else on Earth. Yet this extraordinary richness sits inside one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. The original hotspot has already lost more than 70 percent of its natural vegetation cover. According to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, three in four undescribed plant species worldwide are already at risk — and scientists are in a race against time to document them before they vanish.

As the biologist E.O. Wilson wrote in The Diversity of Life: "Every scrap of biological diversity is priceless, to be learned and cherished, and never to be surrendered without a struggle." That struggle is nowhere more urgent than in the Eastern Himalayas, where species can disappear from a single ridgeline in a single generation.

These two realities are deeply connected, though few people think of them together.

Habitats across the region are shrinking under increasing pressure — fragmentation, climate shifts, and the steady erosion of traditional ecological knowledge. Many threatened plants are disappearing quietly, long before most people will ever know they existed.

In 2002, I documented a new species of wintergreen from Aka Hill in Arunachal Pradesh. I named it Gaultheria akaensis. Today, only a handful of fragile populations remain. I have put up conservation signs in the forest, hoping that awareness might offer some protection.

Fortunately, additional populations of G. akaensis were later discovered and documented in the Darjeeling Himalaya in 2011.

But this is not an isolated story. Across the Eastern Himalaya, rare species persist only in small, vulnerable pockets of habitat often unprotected, unnoticed, and increasingly at risk.

In the Darjeeling Himalaya, for example, another species — Agapetes smithiana — now survives only as a tiny remnant population. Only four individuals remain on the Chitray–Lamedhura hiking trail.

"The plant is crying for your help!!!" — Hand-painted conservation sign for Agapetes smithiana, Darjeeling Himalaya

A Phone Call from a Hiker

Arun contacted me after coming across one of my conservation boards in the Eastern Himalayas. We began speaking about Gaultheria akaensis, and from there about the broader conservation pressures facing the region.

Our conversation soon moved beyond any single plant. Arun described Living Roots' work sourcing tea and spices from landscapes I have studied for decades in Meghalaya, Darjeeling, Assam.

What became clear was the shared geography. The same forests and community-managed hillsides that sustain these crops also shelter rare and threatened species. Any long-term relationship with these products necessarily raises questions of stewardship, habitat continuity, and conservation responsibility.

A Shared Responsibility

I have agreed to serve as Living Roots' consulting botanist, and together we are exploring ways to support conservation research and community-led stewardship across the Eastern Himalaya.

My role is simple: to ensure that the landscapes behind these products are treated not as extraction zones, but as living ecosystems worthy of long-term protection, respect, and scientific attention.

Conservation cannot survive on academic journals alone. It requires new forms of partnership, and people willing to act while there is still time.

What I'll Be Writing About

In the coming months, I will be sharing dispatches from the field: the plants I encounter, the people preserving traditional knowledge, and the conservation challenges unfolding across these mountains.

You will meet Helwingia himalaica (known locally as Patephul), a species I have observed for seven years that survives on the edge of extinction. You will learn about sacred groves, forests protected through cultural and temple traditions long before conservation became a formal discipline. In 2016, I documented more than 90 major sacred groves in the Darjeeling and Kalimpong Himalayas under projects sponsored by the West Bengal Biodiversity Board. I will also talk about the botany of the spices that Living Roots is bringing to your kitchens and what makes them special.

I will also write about a connection that few people outside these hills appreciate: the relationship between Darjeeling's celebrated tea gardens and the rare flora that grows alongside them. Towns like Kurseong — known as the "Land of White Orchids" — and Takdah sit at elevations where high-altitude tea estates share their ecological niche with rare Himalayan orchids, endangered shrubs, and medicinal plants that have grown here for centuries. The same climate that produces the world's most prized flushes of Darjeeling tea also sustains species found nowhere else. When we talk about protecting these landscapes, we are talking about the same soil, the same ridgelines, the same rain.

These landscapes are not abstractions. They are living, threatened systems woven into the same soil that produces the turmeric and tea reaching kitchens around the world.

This is what it looks like when research and responsible industry choose the same direction: toward protection, continuity, and care.

About the Author

Dr. Subhasis Panda is the Principal of Government General Degree College and Research Fellow at the Central National Herbarium, Botanical Survey of India. He has discovered ten plant species new to science and 12 new records for India, received the K.S. Manilal National Award for Angiosperm Taxonomy, and serves as a reviewer for Flora, PLOS ONE, and the Journal of Threatened Taxa.