Dr. Pradit Kampermpool marches through his plant nursery, past row upon row of exotic orchids, before stopping, his chest proudly puffed out, in front of an unremarkable, weedy-looking plant. This plant, he says gravely, cost him a fortune. He developed complicated breeding programs and followed them religiously for almost 10 years to produce it, he says. This plant, he says, is a dancing plant.
“It’s a dancing plant!”
He pauses for effect. Meanwhile, the sun comes up over the green fields. The pointed little leaves of Kampermpool’s dancing plant nod and bounce in the breeze. Somewhere, a bird warbles. Kampermpool is still waiting.
“This plant,” he says again slowly for emphasis, “is a dancing plant.”
Kampermpool stands maybe 5 and a half feet tall. He strides through the nursery, disappearing occasionally behind a screen of orchid stems to reappear seconds later on the other side, his green-and-white polka-dot shirt flashing between gaps in the swaying thicket.
It is almost 6:30 in the morning and we are standing in Kampermpool’s plant nursery in Udon Thani Province, in tropical northern Thailand. It is already hot and humid in the small and unremarkable town, which sits about 35 miles south of the Laos border surrounded by rice paddies and knots of thick jungle. A mile or so to the south of the nursery is downtown Udon Thani, which consists of brightly lit Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises, pizza joints and multiplex movie theaters. Another mile farther south, a small and crowded station links the town by train to Bangkok, about 10 bumpy hours southwest.
At night, elephant handlers — bent, little toothless mahouts — park their elephants implausibly under the store awnings downtown, to shelter from the rain that comes nightly. But this morning at his nursery, it is not yet 7 o’clock, the sun is still low in the sky, and Kampermpool, who is 65, has already been up for hours, singing softly to his dancing plant. It responds to music, he says proudly. “This is the third generation, my friend,” Kampermpool continues, pointing at the dancing plant again. “It’s a Desmodium gyrans. It’s the third generation, OK? Third crossing, OK? Self-pollinated, my friend, third time, third generation.”
The dancing plant grows unchecked in a secluded enclosure at the back of Kampermpool’s nursery, bursting from a brick trough filled with dark wet soil. Black netting hangs in folds overhead to block the sun’s harmful rays, and barbed wire prevents thieves from breaking in to the enclosure at night and stealing a prized sample of the plant. Surly workers kick halfheartedly at clumps of mud in the fields; bales of barbed wire bake in the sun. To the untrained eye, Kampermpool’s nursery looks more like a gulag.
Kampermpool doesn’t care. He cares only about his dancing plant. If a fire broke out tomorrow among the orchids, jumping steadily from trough to trough and advancing slowly, relentlessly, through the nursery, Dr. Pradit Kampermpool would think of only one thing: The Plant.
He would run selflessly through thick banks of smoke to raise the alarm, to build a firebreak with orchids, to take an emergency clipping of his dancing plant and store it in the damp safety of his mouth, to do something! … anything! … just to save it … save The Plant!
Share this observation with Kampermpool and he’ll take it as a veiled threat, stepping backward cautiously, narrowing his eyes, and asking, “What fire? Tomorrow? What do you mean, fire?” After that, he clams up. He’s sulking. The sun climbs higher. The fields get warmer. The pointed little leaves of his dancing plant — his Desmodium gyrans — nod and bounce in the breeze. The bird warbles again. He shrugs. “I spent seven years on this plant,” he explains sheepishly.
The Plant twitches.
Before Kampermpool could start breeding The Plant, he first had to find it. Ask him where it came from and he quickly gets coy, simultaneously jabbing a stubby little thumb at the green hills over his shoulder, pointing vaguely at some trees on the other side of the road, and nodding his head toward Laos in the north, all the while muttering quietly to himself.
When he was a young man, Kampermpool carefully states, considering every word to be sure of giving nothing away, the elders of the hill tribes scattered to the north would talk about a species of plant that danced. They used the dancing plants, he says, high in the mountains, in the jungle villages and the border towns, to make tea.
It was 1976. Kampermpool began to search for the plant. “I hired people to check for me,” he says. “I found one in Yunnan, in China, but the leaves are bigger; they have some near Kanchanaburi, near Burma, but nobody pays attention — it looks like a weed.”
And it does look like a weed. A couple of sprigs of Kampermpool’s plant would not look entirely out of place atop a salad. Neither would it attract attention sprouting from between two paving slabs. If a trusted friend told you it was bok choy, you would not question it.
Eventually, says Kampermpool, crouching suddenly behind a thick clump of orchids and hunching his shoulders, his hired workers found a dancing species growing deep in the jungle. Kampermpool shifts his weight to the balls of his feet, leans forward, and whispers from behind his hand. “Shhhhhhhh,” he says. He is no longer standing in his nursery with the morning sun slanting through the clouds: Dr. Pradit Kampermpool is back in the jungle.
“So I’m watching,” he whispers, parting imaginary foliage and squinting through the years, past the rows of orchids and the bales of barbed wire, to an imaginary clearing. “Hmmm…” he says softly. “Well, the leaves are similar.” He pauses for effect. “Then it moved a little bit!” he shouts, flinging his arms in the air and jumping backward.
It was 1991. The search for the dancing plant was over. It had taken 15 years. “This plant nearly disappeared from the world,” Kampermpool says, “so I dug it up.”
It is a simple statement. Kampermpool is not trying to be literal, but that is exactly what he did. He dug it up. He took a shovel deep into the jungle, dug up the plant, shook the dirt from its roots, brought it back here and carefully planted it in the trough filled with dark, wet soil that sits at the shady end of his nursery. It has remained there ever since, its roots probing the rich mulch that Kampermpool regularly shovels on and gently pats down. Finally, the complex breeding programs, the 24-hour nurturing — the watering, fertilizing, measuring, sampling, pruning, trimming — the crossbreeding, the biopsies, the singing, the coaxing, the watching, the constant monitoring, could begin. First he bred the plant, and then he bred it again — second generation, my friend, OK? — and then later still, he crossbred it with a Chinese species of gyrant to create a hybrid. Slowly, over the years, the plant became The Plant.