Botanical gardens evolved from medicinal gardens founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which later expanded to include beautiful, exotic, unique, and occasionally economically valuable plant species brought back from European colonies and other far-off places ^{(Hill 1915)}. This also contributed to the increase of the collections of the associated herbaria and the horticultural and gardening wealth of these countries ^{(Moore 1974,Bye 1994,Vovides et al. 2013)}.

It was a common activity of botanists and gardeners to collect living plants and bring these exotic plants to the noblemen and kings as well as to commercial enterprises which propagated them for sale. Many such businesses were regularly visited by botanists, who described the plants new and usually placed specimens in herbaria. Many were ornamental plants prized for their beauty or uniqueness. Historical collections and descriptions were published in such places as Curtis’s Botanical Magazine or Illustratione Horticole in articles more than 200 years old.

Since then, botanical gardens continued to serve as repositories of plants and botanical knowledge. Currently, its greatest challenges are how to face the loss of biodiversity, threatened and endangered species, ex situ and in situ conservation, global warming and recently, ecological restoration ^{(Vovides et al. 2013)}. Botanical gardens support projects to learn about biodiversity and compile plant inventories, such as the Catalogue of vascular plants of Bolivia ^{(Jørgensen et al. 2014)} and the Madidi checklist. Although Bolivia is considered a megadiverse country, it is still a “darkspot” of plant diversity, which means that it contains many undescribed and unrecorded plant species ^{(Ondo et al. 2024,Maldonado et al. 2024)}. Key employees of these gardens are taxonomists and botanists, because they provide the main resources for the documentation of biodiversity, through the collections they make in the field, resulting in the floras and monographs of which they are authors. However, these researchers with global knowledge on specific taxonomic groups are scarce and there are fewer and fewer of them ^{(Lagomarsino & Frost 2020)}.

Taxonomists are describing new species, which require morphological, phylogenetic, biogeographical studies and comparison with existing species. Actually, several journals expect molecular analysis too. A lot of potential new species are missing flowers and fruits, essential for description. How to get them? Visit the place again and again and hoping to find finally fertile specimens or just cultivating them.

After the Convention on Biodiversity of 1992 and the Jakarta Mandate of 1995, Bolivia like most tropical countries disallow the collection, reproduction or exchange (or selling) of living plants taken from the wild as a public policy for the conservation of species. This seems on the surface like a sensible thing but in reality, it is not preventing resourceful prívate people from stealing and carrying plants away. However, the restrictions put on botanists, particularly specialists from outside of Latin America, have resulted in a serious scarcity of taxonomical studies involving field work to collect botanical data to learn about the flora in these areas, even while thousands of species are still unknown and going extinct before they are known to science. In some cases, it is necessary to cultivate plants to obtain reproductive parts that are important for determining the species.

Bolivia still has some of the most extensive forests in the world ^{(Ibisch 1998)} and has large expanses of protected areas, but most tropical forests are slowly being eliminated by population growth, road building, mining and agriculture, not by botanists or plant ecologists. Also, in recent years forest degradation caused by logging practices, forest fragmentation and increasingly severe droughts have made many tropical forests more prone to fires ^{(FAO 2013)}. These processes lead to environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, landscape destruction, soil erosion, etc. ^{(Pereira et al. 2012)}.

Although the extraction of plant and animal species for consumption, local commercialization, and illegal trafficking is prohibited, the people finding and taking living plants unfortunately outnumber dramatically those who are in charge of preventing plant collecting (like hundreds on one side versus a few people on the other side). Therefore, it is a losing battle.

On the other hand, many people who have the time and money to have plants in their life are attracted to ornamental or unique plant species, which are of interest to a wide range of plant devotees. Special plant shops, even supermarkets and shopping malls, as well as myriad internet sales vendors all over the world are offering a wide range of plant species for sale. The plants arrive from everywhere, but most have evolved in American and Asian tropical forests. Other plants have been in cultivation for centuries and are grown in greenhouses in temperate regions, where interested gardeners and plant lovers have been growing, reproducing, selling and exchanging plants from the earliest days. Some of these plants are likely extinct in the wild. Unfortunately, most plant lovers have little interest in where their plant came from, only that it is beautiful and pleases them. In the case with plant scientists, they need to know where the species came from.

If it were done correctly, the living material could be gathered, propagated and sold without endangering wild populations, making the plant theft not very economical while at the same time bringing interesting material into cultivation. This works pretty well in Ecuador where there are five companies propagating and selling plants, especially orchids and aroids. This brings millions of dollars into the country while at the same time putting beautiful plants into the living collections of the world, including botanical gardens, where they can be conserved safely.

Tom Croat estimates that there are at least 5,000 species of Araceae in Colombia alone that are still not inventoried. In Bolivia, there are certainly also large numbers of species waiting to be discovered. With the constant destruction of natural forests, many of these species will go extinct before they are collected and studied. It is “Conservation” that has created this situation by making field studies difficult or impossible. First, conservationists justifiably state that there as lots of species needing to be protected, then they assume that the best way to protect them is to make it against the law to collect them. Then they assume that this is actually protecting the plants. What they don’t know is that the destruction of the forests never slows down and the destruction is not caused by biologists, but instead by “progress” or climate change and the day-to-day survival of the people living in these areas, whether they are businesses trying to make a profit while hiring people to collect for them or just millions of people doing what they have always done, namely making a living by clearing forests and planting crops or grazing animals. Most local people do not consider wild life that important and certainly not important enough to cause them to stop making a living or to stop “progress”. So even though we are few in number and do almost no harm to the environment, it is people like us (speaking here of scientists who study natural history) who just want to study plants who are stopped. Few other people even know that any laws exist or prefer to ignore them. The problem is that it is important to us who want to know what exists on the earth before it is destroyed. The current situation is ensuring destruction of habitat and species before they can be properly studied.