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My quest for hidden treasures in Sri Lanka’s flora-by Manasee Weerathunga Bhathiya Gopallawa is a PhD candidate in botany at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. Credit: Kumudu Wijesooriya for Nature Source:Nature My workspace at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, includes shelves stacked with rare, preserved plant specimens. But I also work in the country’s lush forests, a tropical biodiversity hotspot filled with a trove of indigenous plants. My passion for scouting the forests for herbs escalated in 2016, when I joined the National Herbarium in Kandy, Sri Lanka, as a project assistant for the national botanical survey. I realized that, on my island nation, there are many understudied herb families. I am studying one of these, Piper, for my PhD, collecting samples from the Walankanda forest. In March 2021, a researcher working there sent me photographs of a flower. At first, it seemed to belong to the ...