Her father, a judge in a subordinate court system in Tellicherry, kept a garden in their home and wrote two books on birds in the North Malabar region of India. In her later years, she became a forceful advocate for the value and preservation of India’s native plants, earning recognition as a pioneer of indigenous approaches to the environment.Įdavaleth Kakkat Janaki Ammal was born in 1897, the tenth in a blended family of 19 brothers and sisters in Tellicherry (now Thalassery) in the Indian state of Kerala. Her memory is preserved in the delicate white magnolias named after her, and a newly developed, yellow-petaled rose hybrid that now blooms in her name. Sometimes called “the first Indian woman botanist,” Ammal leaves her mark in the pages of history as a talented plant scientist who developed several hybrid crop species still grown today, including varieties of sweet sugarcane that India could grow on its own lands instead of importing from abroad. Today Silent Valley National Park in Kerala, India, stands as one of the last undisturbed swaths of forest in the country, bursting with lion-tailed macaques, endangered orchids and nearly 1,000 species of endemic flowering plants. At 80 years old, Janaki Ammal used her status as a valued national scientist to call for the preservation of this rich hub of biodiversity. And they would have succeeded-if it weren’t for a burgeoning people’s science movement, buttressed by a pioneering female botanist. In 1970, the Indian government planned to flood 8.3 square kilometers of pristine evergreen tropical forest by building a hydroelectric plant to provide power and jobs to the state of Kerala.
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