Memorial Site
Have you visited the Leonard Co, Bayani Ko memorial lately? It’s inside the publicly accessible Herbarium managed by the Institute of Biology in UP Diliman. It’s a wonderful place of calm, surrounded by so much native trees, orchids, gingers, understorey plants, insects, birdsong.
You’ll find the memorial to the People’s Botanist when you click on the pin, right by what is known as the Scholar’s Tree, locally known called Dita (Alstonia scholaris). A third of Leonard Co’s ashes were laid to rest in the spot.
We consider the Herbarium one of our people’s many houses of memory, a fitting description considering the work of Leonard Co, himself a world-renowned keeper of memory, tragically killed 15 years ago by the military during a native plants survey in Kananga, Leyte. Justice continues to be elusive, but we will not allow Leonard Co’s life and legacy to be forgotten.
Click here to see Leonard alongside the food scientist Maria Orosa and the orchidologist Eduardo Quisimbing as depicted in two story-tall mural we commissioned for public display at the Sta. Mesa campus of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines.
