Plant, fruit, and vegetable breeds are usually discovered after vigorous hybrid research and cross-breeding in labs, but a man from Wayanad who never pursued a formal degree in botany ended up knowing the Western Ghats’ plant life better than most people who did.He can rattle off two thousand botanical names the way some people remember phone numbers, has helped find species that had gone unrecorded for over a century, and has plants named in his honour.
Meet Pichan M Salim , the field botanist who never needed a degree to make discoveries
Pichan M Salim’s story begins in 1997, when he was one of twenty local youths picked for a parataxonomy training programme run by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Wayanad, Kerala. He joined the foundation the following year to work on agro-biodiversity conservation and, over time built the ability to identify more than 2,000 botanical names on sight.MSSRF’s profile of him describes how “Mr. Pichan has dedicated his life to carrying out field botany studies and systematically inventorying the flowering plant species of the Western Ghats for the last 20 years.”His fieldwork includes discovering new species with, rare geographical plant records, and dozens of scientific publications.He has 23 new plant species to his name, more than 10 fresh geographical records, and over 53 published papers, according to a New Indian Express report. And it doesn’t stop at just discoveries. Two rare wild species, Seidenfadeniella salimii and Impatiens salimii, are actually named after him.
Salim had also received and award from the president
That body of work hasn’t gone unnoticed. Salim received the Plant Genome Saviour Award for 2020–21, which was awarded to him by President Droupadi Murmu in September 2023, along with state-level honours including the Kerala State Biodiversity Board Award and the Vanamithra Award. Two plant species which arew named after him, from Kerala’s Western Ghats and now listed under Kew’s Plants of the World Online, and Impatiens salimii, a plant native to Kerala.
The most interesting contribution by Salim is solving a centuries-old mystery
Salim’s most interesting contribution involves a plant that had almost vanished from botanical record books. Campbellia aurantiaca, a rare parasitic flowering plant first documented by Scottish botanist Robert Wight in 1849, had not been credibly recorded since, and its identity was confused for years with a related species, Christisonia bicolour.Working with researchers from India and Sri Lanka, Salim helped to rediscover the plant in Wayanad’s Thollayiram area and resolve the taxonomic confusion. The findings were published in the Kew Bulletin in December 2025, the official journal of the Royal Botanic Gardens in England.Sometime earlier, Salim was also part of the team that formally described Dioscorea balakrishnanii, a new wild yam species from the southern Western Ghats, named after conservationist V Balakrishnan, in a paper published in the journal Species.
His homestead is also a gene bank
Salim’s conservation instincts extend well past forest surveys. At his home in Athimoola, Wayanad, he maintains what’s effectively a living seed bank, holding nearly 614 traditional and wild plant varieties, from rare and threatened species to wild ornamentals like Bulbophyllum aureum and Medinilla malabarica.
