The passion of famed botanist Leonard Co

The passion of famed botanist Leonard Co

Sidebar: Leonard Co remembered with tree-planting and re-launch of Common Medicinal Plants of Cordillera
MANILA – “A tree dies. A tree lives. The forest lives forever.” These words greet everyone who would view the photo exhibit put up in memory of botanist Leonard Co at UP Diliman’s Palma Hall. Leonard Co and two of his four companions were killed a year ago by the Philippine military in the forest of Kananga, Leyte while conducting field research. He was collecting plant specimens of endangered species.

The military claims that Co and two of his four companions were killed in a crossfire. But the surviving members of his team swore that there had been no crossfire because the Philippine Army was the only armed group present at the scene during the shooting. The Commission on Human Rights also reported in an evaluation of the physical evidences presented from the scene that the massacre victims did not die due to a crossfire.

Although a year has passed since then and plenty of hearings and a few field investigations have been conducted, those responsible for the death of Co and two of his four companions on that field research have yet to be held accountable for the crime, said the Justice for Leonard Co Movement. As such, on the first anniversary of his death, Co’s family and friends, students and colleagues and members of the Justice for Leonard Co Movement dubbed the activities they held as “a struggle against forgetting, a fight against injustice.”

Tributes 

Leonard Co spent much of his life in the company of plants and people wanting to get to know them better, for all its beneficial uses. From testimonies of those who had known him, worked with him, laughed with him, trekked the mountain and forest trails with him, ate with him and learned from and with him, it appeared that Leonard Co’s ceaseless study and documentation of Philippine plants had transcended the formal structure in the study of that field by the University of the Philippines’ Institute of Biology. Through the years the people comprising the institute had unconsciously given him space, respect and recognition.

Leonard Co with a flowering plant he identified and discovered (Photo courtesy of UP Institute of Biology / bulatlat.com)

“Leonard Co entered UP as botany freshman in the early 70s and never left,” said Dr Perry Ong, head of the Institute of Biology, UP Diliman. Leonard Co was the last graduate of the Bachelor of Science in Botany degree in the institute in 2008. He became a familiar figure, a resident almost, of UP’s Herbarium, which had been like home to him. “Wherever work takes him, at the end of the day, he always goes back to the Herbarium in UP Diliman, noted Dr. Ong.

Co was already an acclaimed master and an authority on Philippine plants when he finally acquired his diploma, which was just a formality, said his colleagues. To students, he was known as that generous Chinese in the Herbarium who would “cure you of plant blindness,” as Dr Ong described his infectious love of plants. He explained that Co and his friend Lagunzad could make you appreciate all the plants in the vicinity, even those you would ordinarily not notice.....MORE

Source:  Bulatlat.com

URL: http://bulatlat.com/main/2011/11/17/the-passion-of-famed-botanist-leonard-co/