Day 0 Addendum — In which I go to Madagascar via Chiswick

By Paul S Bryers, July 17, 2026

I didn’t mention it yesterday, and I should have…..

You cannot walk round Kew without him. Not officially – there’s no plaque, no statue at the gate. He’s just there, in the way the place is arranged and the way you find yourself looking at it, because he taught most of us how to look at anything green or that moves in the first place.

Davidius attenboroughii

Endemic to the United Kingdom.

Range: global.

Last week became the oldest person ever nominated for an Emmy – twice, in the same year, at a hundred.

Long lived.

Well preserved.

Turned one hundred in May 2026.

Voice of the natural world for seven decades and counting.

More species named after him than most of us have friends. A spider. A dinosaur. A ghost shark. An echidna. A pitcher plant somewhere quietly digesting a rat in his honour.

But Kew is where he stops being a voice and starts being a man who turns up.

In 2018 he reopened the Temperate House, restored. In 2023 he handed over thirty-one seeds of the toromiro, a tree from Rapa Nui that no longer exists in the wild – gone from its own island, alive only in cultivation, some of it now growing under that same glass.

And in 1985, while they were still building the Princess of Wales Conservatory, he climbed down into the foundations in a hard hat and buried a time capsule. Seeds. Basic food crops. Endangered species. Things he thought we might need later.

It is to be opened in 2085. I’d say we will definitely need them. He was fifty-nine at the time. He did the arithmetic. He buried it anyway.

I stood on top of it yesterday, looking for a baobab, and had no idea.

Darwin looked at a flower and described a moth he would never live to see. A hundred and thirty years later, a man knelt in a hole at Kew and buried seeds he will never see planted.

That’s the job, I think. For all of us. You describe a thing or a place properly and you hand it on. Whether you’re there for the ending is not the point.

Aye, fine. Attenborough is my hero. I’m not embarrassed about it.

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