The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

Wallace visited Java after having already spent 7 years collecting in the outer islands of the archipelago. He first visited the eastern part of the island, where he seemed more impressed with architectural remains from the Majapahit empire and the earlier great Buddhist monument of Borobodur than with the business of collecting natural specimens. Perhaps, at long last, it was time to reduce the prodigious pace at which he had been hitherto collecting.

View of Gede Summit from Cibodas Botanic Gardens

According to Wallace, “by far the most interesting incident in [his] visit to Java was a trip to the summit of the Pangrango and Gede mountains”. Wallace was fascinated with the transition from tropical to temperate vegetation types as he ascended the 3000-metre mountain and the prevalence of so many familiar European plants at the summits. According to biogeographer Jeremy Smith (1986), it is now widely agreed that the autochthonous element (that which has evolved locally) of Java’s alpine flora is indeed very small, with numerous plants linked to either the northern or southern temperate zones, and an even greater number found across both these zones. The pioneering work of Dutch botanist C.G.G.J. van Steenis earlier in the 20^th century (presented most impressively in The Mountain Flora of Java, 1972, with its stunning collection of 57 colour plates) links 90 alpine plant genera with Asian origins and only 15 with Australian origins. Endemism at the species level, however, is extremely localised and is sometimes restricted to individual mountain tops, as Wallace  comments (incorrectly as it turns out) in relation to Primula Imperialis or Royal Cowslip found on the summit of Gede-Pangrango.

Such tropical alpine regions are in fact isolated islands in a sea of highly diverse lowland rainforest, with which they share very few species. Equipped with the enlightening excitement of evolutionary thought, Wallace began to ponder the origin and migration pathways of these remarkable ecosystems. Wallace was acutely aware of the high level of species endemism and low generic endemism, thus suggesting relatively recent colonisation. In his later groundbreaking work on biogeography, articulated most comprehensively in Island Life, Wallace presented an explanation of this oddity of plant distribution with an entire dedicated chapter: On the Arctic Element in South Temperate Floras (Chapter XXIII). Here, Wallace presented a distribution theory based on an alpine corridor dispersal system. He noted the ‘wonderful aggressive and colonising power of the Scandinavian flora’ that he found and the geologically recent landscape-forming events provided by glacial action and volcanism. In a letter to Wallace following publication of Island Life, Darwin however objected to Wallace’s explanation, commenting that it was “rather too speculative for my old noddle”.

It was in fact Darwin, in the Origin of Species, who had originally hypothesised about the southward march of northern temperate plants during the recent glacial epochs and the retreat (north and south of the equator) following subsequent warming. In their theorising, both Wallace and Darwin were severely handicapped by the prevailing belief in the general permanence of continents and oceans. (Before the time of Alfred Wegener, Wallace would not have been able to incorporate the role of ‘Continental drift’ and the fact that few mountains would have even existed in the region prior to the late Tertiary collision of the Indo-Australian plate with the Eurasian plate). Today, there is still much speculation regarding the origin and migration pathways of Malesian alpine flora and the presumed existence of an ancient mountain bridge between the Himalaya and Java.

Arriving at the main gate to the Gede Pangrango National Park, we were told that stricter management controls meant that it would not be possible to spend more than one night in the park (we had been planning on spending two). This, however, meant that we had a spare afternoon to walk around the adjacent Botanic Gardens at Cibodas. The gardens were first set out in 1852 by Johannes Ellias Teijsmann, then curator of the Bogor Gardens, and when Wallace visited in 1861, there were “many beautiful trees and shrubs planted here, and large quantities of European vegetables are grown for the Governor-General’s table”. Today, this 125-hectare garden is spectacularly laid out amongst manicured lawns and hosts more than 5000 specimens, including the worlds largest flower (Amorphophallus titanum of Sumatra), a recently landscaped moss garden and a surprisingly large number of Australian casuarinas, eucalypts, melaleucas and even Araucaria hoop pines.

The gardens are located directly adjacent to the National Park. It was in 1889 that 240 hectares of this forest were first incorporated within the gardens, later becoming the first Nature Reserve in the Netherlands East Indies. The Indonesian Government established the 21,000 ha National Park in 1980, following it’s earlier designation as part of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1977. Biosphere Reserves are selected as open-air laboratories to test and demonstrate innovative approaches to conservation and development that consciously recognise the role of humans within the landscape. The Cibodas Biosphere Reserve is located less than 100km from the capital Jakarta and experiences strong human pressure from competing land uses while performing a critical ecological education role within Indonesia. The park is home for several endangered species such as the Javan Hawk-eagle and the Javan white gibbon, and hosts more than 40 known species of orchid.

The base of the mountain was once draped in luxuriant tropical rainforest with a structure and composition similar to adjacent islands, but it is now largely given over to wet-rice agriculture, timber plantations, horticultural crops and tea estates, with an ever-encroaching zone of peri-urban development. We commenced our ascent of the mountain in the pre-dawn hours of the following morning, at an altitude of 1250m, walking through the sub-montane rainforest mostly in the dark before arriving at Telaga Biru lake. It was in this zone that Wallace commented on the beauty and diversity of tree ferns,

“of all the forms of tropical vegetation they [tree ferns] are the most striking and beautiful. Some of the deep ravines which have been cleared of large timber are full of them from top to bottom; and where the road crosses one of these valleys, the view of their feathery crowns, in varied positions above and below the eye, offers a spectacle of picturesque beauty never to be forgotten”

“of all the forms of tropical vegetation [tree ferns] are the most striking and beautiful" ARW in The Malay Archipelago

In this forest, we also admired the abundance of epiphytes, such as the Asplenium ‘birdnest’ ferns and numerous orchids, and came across a group of ‘lutung’ leaf monkeys. A highlight for us in this forest was a glimpse of the Javan Hawk-eagle (which, according to the IUCN red list is now critically endangered), as it flew down the mountain above the tree line.

 The vegetation became less bulky as we continued to climb with increasing quantities of moss covering the trees, until we arrived at some hot springs (at an altitude of about 2100m): here we stopped to soak our bodies and first came across the beautiful Rhododendron javanicum, a member of the vireya subgenus group of rhododendron found throughout the mountains of Southeast Asia and New Guinea.

At 2500m, we arrived at Kandang Badak (literally ‘the rhinoceros stable’), although the Javan rhinoceros has long been locally extinct. The only surviving population of Javan rhinoceros is a critically endangered group of less than 60 individuals found in Ujung Kulon National Park at the westernmost part of Java (there are none in captivity). Unfortunately, as many hikers spend the night at Kandang Badak prior to their final ascent to the summit, the ground is littered with instant noodle packets and the used propane cylinders that are now popular with hikers the world over. Wallace also based himself at Kandang Badak, trekking to each of the twin summits of Gede and Pangrango. We continued on to the volcanic summit of Gede, through the stunted elfin moss forests, crustose lichens and increasing abundance of European-type plants such as raspberries and strawberries. Few plants we saw in this zone, however, matched the remarkable form of Balonophora elongata (see photo), a parasitic fungi-like plant that sucks nutrients from the roots of host plants and, being devoid of the need for chlorophyll-based photosynthesis, is covered by red nodules and bulbous white flowers.

At the summit, few plants have successfully adapted to life on the poorly developed rocky soils, although the attractive, red-leafed Vaccinium are certainly common (see photo). Other dominant plants in this alpine zone were species of Albizzia and Gaultheria. While the Pangrango peak is now dormant, Gede is an active volcanic crater whose last major eruption was in 1941 and the ground is littered with volcanic debri. To the southeast of the summit is the alun-alun, now a spectacular alpine meadow, but actually an old crater itself. We camped (strangely alone considering that more 500 visitors can climb the peak on a weekend) by a stream running through the alun-alun amidst a dense covering of Javanese edelweiss (Anaphalis sp): many Indonesians place important spiritual and social value on this ‘eternal blossom’ and conservation activities at the park concentrate on preventing excess plucking by visitors. The vegetation on the southern wall of this extinct crater-meadow is noticeably richer and more diverse than that on the northern side, since the former is comprised of more developed soils while the latter is still dominated by volcanic debri. It was here that we came across some of the temperate plants of Australian origin with a stand of Leptospermum.

The next morning we walked down a far steeper trail to the Gunung Putri entrance gate, and through ‘rasamala’ plantings. Rasamala is a popular native hardwood timber species whose natural stands have been severely depleted by timber extraction. The Gunung Putri entrance also offered a starker look into the severe human pressures facing the park than Cibodas: here vegetable gardens were encroaching into the park despite somewhat token attempts by the park authorities to reforest the gardens using pine trees.

Smith, J. (1986). Origins and History of the Malesian High Mountain Flora. In High Altitude Biogeography (eds. Vuilleumier, F and Monasterio, M).

Van Steenis, C. G. G. (1972). The Mountain Flora of Java. Brill, Leiden.