Meet John Chau, PhD | Plant curator, Filoli Historic House & Garden – IrisBG – Collection Management

In this Community Spotlight article, we feature Filoli's plant curator, John Chau. John is kind, unassuming, and has a quiet sense of humor. Over the past few years, we’ve had the privilege of getting to know him through his work on various IrisBG projects, and it’s clear how passionate he is about his role. John's interests and studies have led him to amazing places, stellar opportunities, and impressive accomplishments. We are genuinely thrilled to share a glimpse of that with you.

IMG-WA0000 (1).jpeg On a hike in the mountains outside Johannesburg, South Africa.

What was the plant that first drew you into the world of botany?
I don't remember any one plant, but I've been drawn to plants since I was a child. In Los Angeles, where I grew up, my family lived in a small house with a small yard where I would spend hours with my hands in the dirt looking at plants and the animals on them.

When I got a bit older, my parents gave me a section of the yard to tend, and I loved starting plants from seed and nurturing them to flower - easy to grow and beautiful things like zinnia, cosmos, nicotiana... I liked trying new things every year, plants that were different and interesting.

You are a trained plant systematist. What attracted you to that field?
Although I have long been interested in plants, it took me a while to figure out what specifically about plants I wanted to focus on studying. I enjoyed taking classes in plant ecology, evolution, morphology, physiology, development, biochemistry, genetics, and other subjects, and even started graduate school in a plant community ecology lab, but as I learned more about plants, I realized that what I found most fascinating about them and what I most wanted to understand better was the diversity of plants and how that diversity came to be, which is the subject of plant systematics.

As someone who has traveled quite a bit for plant research, is there a location that awes you in a botanical sense? Maybe it was the terrain or its plant diversity?
There really are beautiful and interesting plants everywhere - that's something I love about studying botany. But the place I have visited that has captivated me the most botanically is South Africa. In term of the sheer diversity and beauty of the flora, it's astounding. I don't know why, but plants just seem more showy there, and the landscape, climate, and vegetation is so varied! Being from California, I am used to seeing many South African plants, like aloe, apapanthus, dietes, calla lily, gladiolus, strelitzia, etc., as landscape and garden plants - it's amazing to see them growing in the wild, to hike in the fynbos in the Cape and see pelargonium, erica, and leucospermum flowering with sunbirds perching and sipping nectar or walk through a highveld grassland and see proteas and aloes taller than me scattered among the grasses with patches of eucomis, nerine, and gladiolus flowering underfoot.

You've told me about your work with Buddleia. Can you share how you came to work with that genus?

For my graduate work, I studied the evolutionary relationships and biogeography of Buddleja, the butterfly bushes. There is one Chinese species, Buddleja davidii, that is fairly common in horticulture (and as a weed). However, there are more than 100 other species found around the globe, from the deserts of the United States to tropical forests in Madagascar.

JHC101 - IMG_2022 (1).JPG The fuzzy Buddleja blattaria, a rare species from the Andes of Peru.

Each of these species has different morphologies, especially in the flower and inflorescence, and ecological adaptations. It's this diversity that attracted me to the group and the fact that no one had studied it with genetics previously.

I re-named one species in this group. There was a closely related genus, Emorya, with only two species in Texas and Mexico that I found to be nested within the Buddleja clade based on genetic data. To transfer these species to Buddleja, I had to give a new name to one species because its specific epithet was already used in Buddleja and it had no existing synonyms. I named it Buddleja normaniae to honor Eliane Norman, a plant systematist who studied the New World species of Buddleja and wrote a monograph and many papers on them. I had the pleasure of traveling with her on a trip to southwestern China to study and collect Buddleja species there, and I can only hope that my stamina and intellect can be as impressive when I am in my eighties.

IMG_1248 (1).JPG Learning to use a GNSS receiver with horticulturist assistant Leslie.

What is one thing you enjoy most about working at Filoli?
The thing I find most special about Filoli is its history and continuation as English-style formal garden on a California country estate. You can see layers of history from classical English and European garden plants to the botanical legacy of the 1915 San Francisco "world's fair" to the garden trends of the mid-20th century, all carefully maintained by generations of skilled horticulturists.

You have a sweet tooth, right? What is your favorite dessert?
Oh, it's so hard to choose! There is a Chinese dessert that I love, black sesame soup (芝麻糊) [it's also vegan and gluten free]. It's a warm, comforting bowl of ground sesame cooked with water and sugar and thickened with ground rice - so fragrant and delicious. There's a version with walnuts too.

Any entertainment recommendations (books, podcasts, films)? Can be plant-based or not.
I'm reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer now, which I'm really enjoying. If you haven't watched The Green Planet documentary series, that's definitely worthwhile. Another documentary, Sexual Encounters of the Floral Kind, is a classic.

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