PATHLESS FOREST

The incredible story of one man s obsession to find and protect the world s largest flowers As a child Chris Thorogood dreamed of seeing Rafflesia the plant with the world s largest flowers He crafted life size replicas in an abandoned cemetery carefully bringing them to life with paper and paint Today he is a botanist at the University of Oxford s Botanic Garden and has dedicated his life to studying the biology of such extraordinary plants working alongside botanists and foresters in Southeast Asia to document these huge mysterious blooms Pathless Forest is the story of his journey to study and protect this remarkable plant a biological enigma still little understood which invades vines as a leafless parasite and steals its food from them We join him on a mind bending adventure as he faces a seemingly impenetrable barrier of weird wonderful and sometimes fearsome flora finds himself smacking off leeches hanging off vines wading through rivers and following indigenous tribes into remote untrodden rainforests in search of Rafflesia s ghostly foul smelling blooms more than a metre across We depend on plants for our very existence but two in five of the world s species are threatened with extinction nobody knows how many species of Rafflesia mi