Hooked on Weeds-The Wetland Warrior of Ilan

Now 35 years old, Lin Chun-chi first started photographing aquatic plants full-time over a decade ago. He had been fascinated with them ever since childhood, and always felt a pang of regret every time he saw yet another of their wetland habitats fall victim to development. His distress drove him to borrow a plot of land from his family just for the cultivation of aquatic plants. An avid nature photographer from his youth, Lin soon found his whole life revolving around wetland flora.

As Lin Chun-chi drives me out to his home in the rural township of Chuangwei, not far from Ilan City, we wend our way through an endless procession of rice fields. Gazing out the car window, I now and then spot a moorhen or white-breasted water hen scurrying about between the paddies. Before long we come to Lin Chun-chi's land, a series of flooded paddies surrounded by waist-high fences and filled with over 300 species of carefully cultivated aquatic plants.

We head for the gate and make our way into Lin's handmade wetland. Some paddies are full of plants rising above the water to all different heights. Others are set aside just for lotus and water lily. Bits of clouds and blue sky reflect between the plants off the broken surface of the water. Plants of every description cover the raised earthen barriers between the different paddies, their tiny maroon, yellow, and white blossoms standing out brilliantly in the sun.

Over 300 species of aquatic plants have been identified in Taiwan, and almost every one is present in Lin Chun-chi's paddies, brought here one at a time from all over the island by Lin himself. His enthusiasm has even led him to bring in a few specimens from overseas. Some live completely submerged, some float on the water's surface, and others send stalks and leaves into the air above the water.

Because many aquatic plants and scatter their seeds via freely flowing water, their flowers do not need to compare in size or brilliance with those of their terrestrial relatives, which must attract bees to be pollinated. With a few notable exceptions (such as the water lily and lotus, and edibles like water bamboo and Chinese water chestnut), the average person looks upon most aquatic plants as just that-nameless plants that grow in the water. Farmers routinely used herbicides to clear them from their fields.

After Lin began cultivating aquatic plants, puzzled family members asked him: "People grow rice. Why in the world do you have to go out of your way to grow weeds?"

All things great and small

The aquatic plants that most people overlook contain an entire universe of fascination for Lin Chun-chi. The names alone are the stuff of poetry. Take the bluewings that Lin brought back from the island of Kinmen, for example. The name derives from the plant's little purple flowers, which are shaped like butterfly wings. The narrow-leaf cattail, known colloquially in Chinese as the water candle, forms a long yellow head that eventually turns rust-red as the tightly clustered flowers bloom. Lin's paddies are further decorated with the white blossoms of the willow, the lavender water hyssop , and the yellow Taiwan brandy bottle. Although the plants are stubby and the flowers small, if you stoop for a closer look, you will actually find some superb floral displays.

Forktail fighting fish dart amidst the jade-green hornwort, roiling the surface of the water to create the bubbles that they need to hatch their young. The insectivorous golden bladderwort busily traps passing bugs. Its flowers do their business underwater without opening their petals; each flower contains its own pistil and stamen, and pollinates itself. When the time comes, the seeds are released into the water.

Duckweed plants hardly larger than an ant float on the surface in uncounted thousands, drifting wherever the water flows. Especially notable is the dwarf duckweed, the smallest flowering plant in the world and one of five species of duckweed found in Taiwan. It's almost too small to see with the naked eye! In contrast to the dwarf duckweed, Lin has set apart a special paddy just for the prickly water lily, the largest aquatic plant in Taiwan. Also known as the Gorgon Plant, its giant leaves float on the surface of the water and curl up at the edges. Several prickly water lilies are in a race for supremacy, and in time there will only be two or three leaves, each measuring well over a meter across. They will cover almost all the available space in the paddy.

The gardener who cared a lot

Lin's land provides different niches for every type of aquatic plant found in Taiwan. Box grass sways in the breeze on the banks above the water. A little further over, sawgrass brought in from Orchid Island raises its tousled head to a height of over two meters.

Lin cultivates a lot of hardy amphibious plants that demonstrate the mysterious will to live that is found throughout nature. When plant life on the water's surface gets too crowded, many plants that normally grow submerged are nevertheless capable of rising above the water. The water hyssop, for example, is well adapted to life on land, and Lin has planted it on the ridges between the paddies to very decorative effect.

Aquatic plants are a key part of any wetland ecological system. Without them there would be no aquatic insects to support the forktail fighting fish or the mosquito fish. And so it goes, right on up the food chain.

Lin Chun-chi is also a big fan of butterflies, and makes a point of growing the types of plants that butterflies require. If you come at the right time and look closely, you may spot a butterfly tugging on the twigs to test for a sturdy place to lay its eggs. Meanwhile, papyrus serves as a very effective windbreak.

Lin used to be laughed at for turning his back on rice and planting "nothing but weeds," but his efforts have resulted in a marvelous garden.

A lifetime passion

In many ways, Lin Chun-chi is still the same person he was decades ago-a curious kid scrambling up streams and through fields, catching fish, netting butterflies, picking leaves off plants, and getting dirty from head to toe. As a boy, the irrigation ditch next to his home was his "aquarium," but right from the start Lin liked the plants better than the fish, and he couldn't help noticing that the plants used in aquariums were often the very same ones to be found in ditches and ponds all over Taiwan.

After finishing his obligatory two years of military service, he just wanted a job that would allow him to spend his days photographing nature, so he rented an orchard in the mountains. Once the annual harvest was finished, he was free to traipse around his beloved outdoors. After photographing over 300 species of butterfly, though, he gave up on the orchard to devote himself full-time to photographing aquatic plants.

In comparison with other types of plant life, the study of aquatic plants in Taiwan has long been quite disorganized, but excessive habitat destruction has spurred the academic community to work with great urgency in recent years on taxonomic research. Lin Chun-chi has been deeply involved in this effort, albeit as an amateur.

A lot of aquatic plants look pretty much alike at first glance, but differences are apparent to a collector like Lin, who pores through books and pictures from around the world to learn everything he can about them. He searches assiduously through the writings of past naturalists to see what aquatic plants they've found and where, then goes to the same places to see if he can find them. The records show, for example, that the insectivorous Indian sundew has previously been found on Mt. Hutou in Taoyuan County, the Kuanwu area of Miaoli County, and Chiting in Hsinchu County. Lin has made separate trips to each place in search of it.

The outdoorsman

Lin has now been tramping through ponds, marshes, and paddies throughout Taiwan for over a decade, sometimes spending weeks and even months in a single area. He is a virtual one-man dragnet, and has personally combed just about every square inch of all the wetlands in his native Ilan County. "His laboratory is the great outdoors," says Li Hsiao-ching, a graduate student who has accompanied Lin on a foray or two. "There's not a place in Taiwan he hasn't been. All the field work he's done has turned him into a first-class explorer."

Taiwan may be a relatively small island, but for Lin Chun-chi there is no end to the aquatic plants that can be found here, for the island's diverse topography nurtures a wide range of ecological niches. "Taipei County is fantastic," says Lin. "You can go to Sanchih and Chinshan to find a couple of my favorites. One is duck lettuce, which is endangered, and the other is a type of water plantain called caldesia grandis." Anyplace with aquatic plants, of course, is a beautiful place in Lin's estimation. The township of Kuantien in Tainan County is famous for its abundance of water caltrop, but that's not why Lin travels to the area 10 or 15 times a year. He goes there to see a type of miniature bullrush and a sedge that are not to be found in Ilan.

After all he's seen, however, Lin Chun-chi still feels his own Ilan County is the best place of all for aquatic plants. Ilan receives more rainfall than anywhere else in Taiwan, and is dotted with countless lakes and ponds. Shuanglien Pi, a pair of lakes that Lin has frequented since childhood, is home to nearly 90 species of aquatic plants. These plants, along with the fish that live off them, attract large numbers of ducks and geese. Exclaims Lin, who has visited the lakes more times than he can count, "Shuanglien Pi is an absolute masterpiece of wetland ecology! Nothing anywhere else in Taiwan can compare with it!" Firefly photographer Chen Jung-tsan quips that Lin could find his way around the lakes blindfolded.

Hazards of the job

A person doesn't tramp around in the wilderness year after year, of course, without suffering an occasional mishap. Oddly enough for a lover of aquatic life, Lin has never learned how to swim, and it almost proved fatal once when he was trying to pick a stem of bladderwort at Shuanglien Pi. He lost his balance and fell into the lake, but luckily managed to grab onto a clump of grass and pull himself to safety.

He also had a close call in rural Chiayi County while out hunting for a type of seagrass called halophila ovalis. Records indicate that this seagrass, common today in the Penghu islands, was once observed in Chiayi County. Since Chiayi is directly across the Taiwan Strait from Penghu, Lin wondered whether the halophila ovalis didn't perhaps make its way between the two places via the sea.

To check out his theory, Lin drove his car one sunny August day to a salt flat near the coastal town of Putai and set out on foot in search of the halophila ovalis. An hour or more later he found what he was looking for, but the day took an unexpected turn when he came across two other rare plants. He started photographing them and forgot about everything else, including the heat and his lack of protection from the searing tropical sun. By the time he realized something was wrong, he was already in trouble. All alone and far off the beaten path, Lin suffered sunstroke. "My head felt like it was going to split open, and I had to crawl the last part of the way back to the car. Pretty stupid, huh?"

The accidents have done nothing, however, to curb Lin's peripatetic habits. Up until very recently, the only known sighting of a type of water plantain known as alisma canaliculatum, for example, had occurred during the Japanese colonial period in the township of Yangmei in Taoyuan County. The specimen, unfortunately, had been taken back to Japan. "The first time I read about it," says Lin, his face beaming with excitement, "I told myself I just had to find that same plantain!" By a serendipitous turn of events, he eventually got his wish. Three years ago on an outing with friends to photograph stag beetles in Sanchih, he lost his footing while scrambling among terraced rice paddies and fell headlong into the muck. But lo and behold! He had fallen right on the elusive alisma canaliculatum. A guardian angel must have been watching over him, for just the night before he had been looking at a drawing of that very plant, and he had even had a dream that night about finding it.

Some may call it serendipity, but that kind of luck only comes to those who've put in a lot of spadework. Lin thinks nothing of climbing three hours into the hills to see a particular plant, or going all the way to Orchid Island or Green Island for a single photo. Back when he had first given up his orchard for full-time photography, he had to sell one of his two cameras. "You can buy a lot of film with NT$50,000," comments Lin. He had so little money that while on the road he had to live out of his van and bathe in mountain streams, but his unflagging enthusiasm has now made the indefatigable Lin an expert on Taiwan's aquatic plants. He has closely examined and measured their roots, stems, leaves, berries, and petals. He knows what kind of conditions are preferred by each species. He knows that the lantern seedbox, tropical sundew, and primrose willow are at their prettiest between six and nine in the morning.

But there's more to the man than raw energy, says Li Hsiao-ching. "He doesn't just run around in wetlands. He knows the botanical names and common names of all these plants. He's looked at them all under the microscope."

Where have all the flowers gone?

Lin Chun-chi sees aquatic plants as the weakest link in Taiwan's ecological system. Many of the plants he has collected are disappearing quickly. When he goes out to check whether specific species still grow where records show them to have been found in the past, six or seven times out of ten he finds that conditions at the locations described in the literature have changed and the plants are gone.

Even when he does manage to find what he's looking for, the plants often have but a tenuous hold on a changing habitat. In Taipei County's Hsichih, for example, the pond considered the last remaining home of the miramar weed was filled in about half a year ago. In Kaohsiung County there is a rare species of ambulia that grows only in certain ponds in the township of Meinung, but the problem is that it always grows alongside an edible plant called the water banana. Farmers use herbicide on the ambulia and have nearly eliminated it entirely.

The hornwort, an extremely popular aquarium plant that small freshwater fish like to take cover in, is now a rare plant due to an invasion by the non-native fu shou snail. This snail has also been very hard on the Taiwan water spangle, which now survives only in paddies where the snail has not yet invaded. And then there's the ivy-leaved duckweed, which only survives in a single pond in Ilan. Last year this very pond was converted into a fish farm, and the ivy-leaved duckweed there is on the retreat.

The path less traveled

Lin Chun-chi says that the plants in his paddies are to him just like lost children that he has brought home to raise. Now that he has so many, he has begun to receive offers from people interested in buying from him. Some people suggest that he should open his fields to visitors. Lin refuses all such suggestions, however, explaining that he's not in it for the money. In the last couple of years he has been doing a research project for a client, and this has finally enabled him to earn enough to pay off the loan on his beat up old van, so there's no need to worry about money.

As for marriage, Lin states without hesitation that the prospect is out of the question, for he has to make the rounds of Taiwan's wetlands every year. "There's nothing in the world that could get me to say good-bye to my plants."

Impelled by some force unfamiliar to the average couch potato, Lin treks into the mountains every year to photograph butterflies laying their eggs. "When the butterflies all show up in May and June, I've got to be there or I would go through the year feeling like I had really missed out on something."

Lin makes frequent day trips to photograph aquatic plants, and on these occasions he only comes home after dark. On days when he's not away on a shoot, however, his schedule is just like that of any farmer. Early to bed and early to rise is a way of life with Lin. He goes out jogging before sunrise and then heads for the paddies to look after his plants. Keeping out the voracious fu shou snail is a top priority, and he always checks to see that there's enough water in the paddies. He may not be married, but he certainly knows what it's like to raise a family.

"Life is short. As long as you can keep food on the table," says Lin philosophically, "nothing else really matters." Like so many of the deepest truths in life, the concept itself is not at all difficult to understand; it's just hard to live out. "All you really need in life is to do something that you like, something that is meaningful in some way."

Looking recently for a company to publish a book on aquatic plants, Lin chose a newly established publisher. "People have to look out for each other. I know what it's like to be starting out without any money."

For Lin Chun-chi, the definition of success is simple: to find the aquatic plants you're looking for, and to take care of them. Apart from that, he just hopes that Taiwan's aquatic plants will always continue to thrive, and that his paddies will never run dry.

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Two of Taiwan's "rarest species"-Lin Chun-chi and the "wind box tree" (Cephalanthus naucleoides). Lin is perhaps the only farmer who would rather grow weeds than rice, while this wind box tree is one of only about 100 left growing wild in the wetlands of Taiwan.

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Over 300 species of aquatic plants populate Lin Chun-chi's paddies, including (shown left to right above) the Taiwan brandy bottle, water hyacinth, lantern seedbox, and water snowflake.

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One little pond provides niches for all kinds of plants. Some are submerged or floating, while others are emerged or grow on the banks. Pictured above from left to right are the Gorgon plant, Cuban pondweed, wind box and water fern.

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The water hyacinth, scampi (a type of prawn), and fu shou snail (lower left) have two things in common. They are not native to Taiwan, and they are wreaking havoc upon aquatic plants around the island. Even more havoc, however, is caused by construction projects and the draining and filling of ponds and marshes. (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)