Author profile
Duncan Macrae.
Herpetologist. Amateur ethnobotanist. Author of Founder's Notes.
A species of monitor lizard carries his name. His fieldwork across Indonesia, southern Africa, South India, and the South Pacific put him in front of plants long before analytical laboratories or extract specifications entered the picture. That personal record — the encounters, not the CV — is what the Founder's Notes are made of.
The herpetologist
A species carries his name.
In 2001, on the Indonesian island of Batanta, a new species of monitor lizard was formally described by Böhme and Jacobs and named in Duncan's honour — Varanus macraei, the blue-spotted tree monitor. The naming sits in the peer-reviewed taxonomic record and is the reason Duncan appears in the herpetological literature at all.
Around the same period he founded Rimba, a reptile park on Bali, and the CV Herpafauna breeding operation in Indonesia. The reptile trade — Herpafauna, and later Worldwide Fauna out of Singapore — ran for most of the 2000s and 2010s in parallel with everything else he was doing.
The through-line to the botanical work is the classifier's eye. When his essays argue that “Brahmi” on a label could refer to two entirely different plants, or that noble kava and tudei kava are a chemotype distinction rather than a marketing one, they are being written by someone who is used to species-level identity mattering. Names are not a formality; they are the load-bearing thing.
The amateur ethnobotanist
5 first-encounter moments.
Long before the analytical laboratories and the chemotype specifications, there were the encounters. Each Founder's Note opens with one — a plant handed over, a coconut shell of murky liquid poured, a curry served without any mention of health.
South Pacific
early twenties
Kava
“I was handed a coconut shell of murky, peppery liquid at a village gathering one evening, told to drink it in one go, and within twenty minutes understood why an entire region has built its social life around this plant.”
Read the noteKaroo & Namaqualand
reptile fieldwork
Kanna
“It was one of the local trackers who first handed me a piece of dried, twisted plant material to chew on during a long, dry afternoon in the field — kanna, he called it, the same plant his grandparents' generation had chewed on hunts.”
Read the noteIn parallel
2001
Tongkat Ali
“Back in 2001, I was stretched across different ventures, sleep in short supply, looking for something that would help me hold steady without caffeine crutches or anything synthetic. That search is what first put Tongkat Ali on my radar.”
Read the noteMadurai, South India
unrelated business
Moringa
“It was a host family outside Madurai, not a market stall or a herbalist, who first put moringa in front of me — as drumstick curry, made from the long ridged pods of a tree growing right outside their kitchen. Nobody mentioned health benefits. It was just dinner.”
Read the noteKerala
Ayurvedic afternoon
Bacopa
“During those same years of travel through India for business that had nothing to do with botanicals, I spent an afternoon with an Ayurvedic physician in Kerala who showed me a small, succulent, creeping plant he called Brahmi — and sorting out which Brahmi was which turned out to be a more useful education than the plant itself.”
Read the note
Start here
The Pacific Root That Built a Culture Around Calm: Kava
A South Pacific village gathering, Captain Cook's naturalist naming Piper methysticum in 1786, and why the noble-versus-tudei kava distinction determines whether a batch is a product or a liability.