Village Gardeners
WE BEGAN THE NEW YEAR WITH A "FIRST" FOR THE GROUP - a travelling
theatre - a theatrical presentation by Mr Geoff Hales, a Cambridge thespian,
who has ventured into the field of presenting the lives of famous plant
collectors and gardeners.
We were presented with the life of Ernest Wilson - "The Chinese Gooseberry Man" - as botanists will know - Actinidea Chinensii - the good old kiwi fruit, which was one of the first plants he found. He spent many years at the beginning of the 20th century in China, collecting plants and seeds for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and latterly for the Harvard Arboretum in Boston.
We, the audience, were a group of expatriate plant lovers in China, to whom he was bidding a final farewell and thanks for their support, before returning home to England. "No happier a group than plant lovers and gardeners."
"After humble beginnings as a gardener inmy home town of Chipping Camden,
via the Botanic Gardens in Birmingham and the R.H.S. gardens at Kew, as a newly
married man in 1903, I was paid £100 per annum by the Veech seed company to go
to China to collect plants for them. I initially found China a "botanical
paradise"; Clematis, rambler and tea roses, magnolias, orange, peach,
lemon and Camelias. I was to search for the Handkerchief Tree, first discovered
by Pere David in 1869, which I successfully did, as well as Actinidea
Chinensii. I accomplished this by proudly refusing to learn Mandarin, dressing
as a native and carried in a sedan chair by my dedicated band of porters, who
of course took with them a pharmacy of insect powder, brandy, quinine and
opium. My only real companion was my faithful black spaniel, who spent a lot of
his time strapped to my back in the awful terrain - especially on the sheer
gorges along the Yangstze. Two of my great finds were the yellow
poppy-Mecanopsis Integrafolia, which thrived in Yak dung along the Chinese
border with Tibet at about 12,000 BC and the red poppy Punicea. This was
greatly valued by the R.H.S. but described by the Times correspondent as a red
rag on a stick!
I returned again in 1905 and discovered Primula Wilsonii although I was here to collect bulbs of Lillum Regale for the Harvard collection. On this visit I was less enamoured with the country - I caught malaria, stayed in some disgusting chinese inns and had to leave fairly rapidly when the death of the Emperor destabilized the country. I returned to Boston with my precious cargo of bulbs packed carefully in clay, but the majority of them had rotted so I made a final journey back in 1908 to replace them. I fell on this trip, breaking my leg very badly which left me with a permanent limp, though my life was saved by local doctors and opium.
This was to be my last expedition - my wanderings were over, though not before I'd collected 65,000 plant specimens.
Our next meeting is on March 20th when Richard Ford will talk about Ornamental Grasses. All welcome.
A BIG APOLOGY! The Great Dixter Trip is on JUNE 30th rather than July 30th, as we reported in the January Crier.