Kwesi the Space Botanist

Move over, Mark Watney, there’s a new space botanist heading for Mars! Ryan and I have just finished watching the new Netflix series Away, which follows (over 10 episodes) the quest of five international astronauts to be the first people to set foot on the red planet.

NASA astronaut Emma Green is the mission commander. Second in command is Indian astronaut Ram. Space veteran cosmonaut Misha is the cranky Russian engineer. Taikonaut Lu is – by international agreement – to be the first person on Mars, for the glory of China. Expert botanist Dr Kwesi Weisberg-Abban is the British rookie, on his first trip to space.

Over the course of the series, we learn Kwesi’s back story. When he lost his birth parents in Ghana he was adopted by a Jewish couple and came to live in England. His adopted father was a gardener, and a shared love of plants enabled him to bond with Kwesi and help him adapt to life in a new country. Little wonder, then, that Kwesi chose to become a botanist.

In episode 2, we see that Kwesi has started to grow plants on the spaceship, in soil from Ghana. His great hope is to bring life to Mars… or back to Mars!

In episode 5, as the crew is celebrating the holidays with Misha’s space-brewed vodka, Kwesi brings out the first space salad harvest for them to munch on. (We don’t learn what he’s grown – except it’s “not arugula” and there’s spinach.)

I won’t give away the plot, but the greenhouse on the spaceship features quite heavily in episode 6, which starts with Kwesi and Ram watering the plants with a syringe. Later on, there’s a lovely scene in which the entire crew congregates in the greenhouse, drawn in by the environment the plants create.

Emma says: “This place has just become a little refuge for me.” Ram:  “I