14 The Plant Hunters

14

 

The Plant Hunters

 

At the Chelsea Flower Show in the spring of 1926, delayed for a week by the General Strike, the British public was riveted by a sensational new flower that seemed like the stuff of legend. It came from south-eastern Tibet, country as strange and remote as the moon, and yet here it was in England, apparently prospering as though it were native. In the history of horticulture, few plants achieved such popularity so rapidly as the Tibetan blue poppy. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a poppy at all but a meconopsis, from the Greek meaning ‘like a poppy’ but the distinction was too fine for many to care. For the American gardener and biographer Eleanor Perenyi, they were the ‘color of a summer day, with golden anthers’. The familiar red poppy had been adopted in 1921 by Field Marshal Alexander Haig as a remembrance of the sacrifice of the Great War; the blue poppy was both an echo of that sacrifice and a fresh start. Blue flowers had been a powerful motif in Romanticism, a symbol of love, but also of the infinite and the unreachable. And where else would this ideal originate but mysterious, spiritual Tibet?

The following year, seedlings of the blue poppy went on sale at Chelsea

for a guinea each: three days’ wages for a labourer. Thomas Hay, superintendent of the Royal Parks in London bedded out massed displays of the new flower in Hyde Park, delighting the public and inspiring amateur gardeners to try for themselves. Alas, blue poppies proved fiendishly difficult to grow: Perenyi dubbed them her ‘abominable snowman’ so conspicuous were they by their absence, despite repeated attempts.

I have never seen it – not the tiniest shoot having come up from repeated sowings…. I would give anything for a glimpse of it even in somebody else’s garden.

In his memoirs, Russell Page, the impossibly tall designer of gardens for everyone from the Duchess of Windsor to Oscar de la Renta, judged the blue poppy ‘as difficult to succeed with as the philosopher’s stone’. (Always tuned to the infinite, Page married as his first wife Lida, niece of the mystic George Gurdjieff; his second was the widow of poet René Daumal, author of Mount Analogue.)

Such judgments, not quite deserved, were a disappointment for the slight,

taciturn man who more than anyone was responsible for the sensation the blue poppy made in 1926. Frank Kingdon-Ward was not the first European to discover or even collect the blue poppy; that distinction went to a French missionary forty years earlier. Kingdon-Ward wasn’t even the first Briton: that was the enigmatic explorer, spy and diplomat Eric Bailey, recorded in the Latin name for one of the handful of species of blue poppy, Meconopsis baileyi. Bailey had discovered the flower before the Great War in south-east Tibet while exploring the secrets of the Tsangpo gorges. Yet it was Kingdon-Ward, a gifted plant collector, who was able to collect viable seed and bring the plant to market, a landmark in his long career.

The son of Harry Marshall Ward, professor of botany at Cambridge

University, Frank had once heard a friend of his father say: ‘There are places up the Brahmaputra where no white man has ever been.’ As a boy, the notion of discovery thrilled him. In 1924 he was ‘up the Brahmaputra’ himself, three hundred kilometres east of Lhasa and following in the footsteps of his hero Eric Bailey, gazing at the flower that would make him famous. ‘Never,’ he wrote in The Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges,

have I seen a blue poppy which held out such high hopes of being hardy, and of easy cultivation in Britain. Being a woodland plant it will suffer less from the tricks of our uncertain climate; coming from a moderate elevation, it is accustomed to that featureless average of weather which we know so well how to provide it with; and being perennial, it will not exasperate gardeners.

It did exasperate gardeners, but Kingdon-Ward’s description reveals his genius as a plant hunter, perhaps the last of the great collectors who with immense courage and expertise travelled the Himalaya. In relocating the valuable species they found there around the world, they enriched the gardens of Europe and North America and transformed economies. Just as the growing awareness of Buddhism, from the patient scholarship of Eugène Burnouf and Sylvain Lévi to the wild imaginings of Helena Blavatsky, changed the philosophical and spiritual landscape of Europe, botany’s exploration of the intensely biodiverse eastern Himalaya would alter its physical landscape too. But gardeners at horticultural shows on both side of the Atlantic were not the only beneficiaries of this exchange: plants travelled in the opposite direction too, into the Himalaya, in some cases a catalyst for social, economic and demographic upheaval with long-term political consequences that still ripple outwards today.

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There was nothing new about plant hunting. Our species has been relocating other species for pleasure and profit since we began. Ancient Egyptians sent out expeditions to find the trees that produced the resin they burned in their temples. What changed in the eighteenth century was epistemological: Sweden’s Carl Linnaeus, the ‘prince of botanists’, founder of modern ecology, created a workable system of binomial classification for every species on earth. With a reliable intellectual structure in place to study the earth’s plants and creatures, exploration had a powerful new tool with which to approach the undiscovered. In 1768 Linnaeus’ pupil and fellow Swede Daniel Solander took leave from his job cataloguing the collection at the British Museum to join the wealthy naturalist Joseph Banks on board James Cook’s Endeavour for its famous three-year voyage, first to Tahiti to witness the transit of Venus, then in search of Antarctica. When Endeavour reached home in July 1771, it was Banks, not Cook, whom London applauded loudest. George III gave him great influence at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the energetic Banks used the opportunity to encourage more botanists to go exploring. He had brought home an extensive plant collection – or herbarium – from his voyage round the world but little that would grow. What he wanted were living specimens, bulbs, roots and seeds, shipped home as quickly as possible.

The first professional collector he sent into the field was Francis Masson

in 1772 and to the place that had most inspired Banks on his travels: South Africa. Much later in life and confined to a wheelchair by gout, Banks suggested to a young Norfolk-born botanist called William Jackson Hooker that he go to Iceland. It was the first collecting trip of what would turn out to be a remarkable career. Although a second expedition to Ceylon had to be shelved, at great personal expense, Hooker made further collecting trips in Europe and built a reputation as a botanic writer and collector, partly to pay his debts. In 1820, he was appointed professor of botany at Glasgow University, where he helped establish the Royal Botanic Institution of Glasgow to supply the university with medicinal plants; later he persuaded the British government to include scientists on official expeditions. In 1841, by then in his mid fifties, he took over as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. It was an auspicious moment. Botany was playing an increasingly important role in the economic development of the British Empire and Kew, along with the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, was central to that, breeding viable commercial species for the various colonies’ particular climates and locations. The abolition of tax on glass, ‘that absurd impost on light’ as The Lancet described it, also allowed a rapid expansion of commercial greenhouses. Technology was catching up with aspiration and Kew and Edinburgh became the engines of what was known as ‘economic botany’.

All plant hunters faced challenges, but the deep gorges and steep slopes

of the Himalaya were remote and their geography poorly known. And while an experienced collector could scan a mountainside for the unfamiliar, they still faced the challenge of reaching their target and assessing its potential, be it aesthetic or commercial, or both. They also had to do this twice, first when the plant was flowering and then again when it produced seed, meaning the collector would have to know its precise location often in areas that hadn’t yet been mapped. And of course there was always the risk that by the time they returned the plant might have been eaten or crushed. If it was intact, then the collector faced hours of painstaking work each evening, preparing herbarium specimens, writing up detailed notes, drying and cleaning seeds and packing everything so that the seeds remained viable.

One great advantage that Edwardian collectors like Kingdon-Ward

enjoyed was access to a terrarium, a sealable glass container. The terrarium, known at first as a Wardian case after its inventor Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, is one of those inventions that most people have never heard of even though it radically changed the world. Before Ward, specimens collected by plant hunters had only a narrow chance of making it home in a viable state. Many plants travelled badly, especially at sea, exposed to salt spray on deck or else hidden in the dark below, and sailors were disinclined to share valuable drinking water with a plant if it began to run low. The problem was recognised as a major hurdle preventing the spread of valuable crops around the world. Ward’s invention would overcome this problem, another chain in the link of our hyperconnected world.

Born in 1791 and raised in the Essex town of Plaistow, Nathaniel Ward

was the son of a doctor who followed his father’s example, plying his trade from ‘dingy dwellings’ in Wellclose Square in London’s docklands, very much a Dickensian scene, wreathed in smog that poisoned Ward’s garden and his collection of ferns. (Joseph Conrad lived there too, as a young sailor a few years after Ward’s death.) As a boy he would get up at three in the morning to go botanising in the Essex countryside and his deep knowledge and medical background put him at the heart of London’s scientific society. Most early botanists were medical men, since the remedies, syrups, powders and ointments they gave their patients grew in gardens or wild in the countryside: materia medica, as it was known. Most of the botanic gardens founded in the era were linked to hospitals.

Ward was an entomologist as well as a gardener, and in the late 1820s,

looking into a sealed glass bottle that contained the pupa of a moth and some leaf mould, he noticed that seeds trapped in the bottle were germinating. He put the jar on a window ledge and over the next few months watched them grow into common species of grass and fern. It was only when the bottle top failed – four years later – that the plants died. Through the 1830s Ward experimented with sealed glass containers, proving beyond doubt that plants could thrive in a well-lit closed environment without the need for watering. Moisture could be recycled almost indefinitely, condensing out of the air at night to soak the soil once more. Two prototypes were sent to Australia with British plants that happily survived the journey. Then the boxes were cleaned out and returned to Ward with the Australian fern Gleichenia microphylla growing inside. Despite a trip around Cape Horn, the fern was alive and well when it reached London.

Among the first people Ward told about his long and patient research was

William Hooker, whose son Joseph Dalton Hooker became one of the first plant collectors to use the invention in the field. Joseph, William’s second son, is most widely known now as the friend and correspondent of Charles Darwin but his career as a botanist was even more glittering than his father’s. Towards the end of his life, during a speech to the Royal Society, he described himself as a ‘puppet of natural selection’, growing up in a household steeped in botany and exploration. He was identifying mosses as a small boy and sitting on his grandfather’s knee reading Cook’s Voyages. Although in his youth he suffered from croup – his mother dubbed him ‘croaky Joe’ – any infirmity disappeared as he grew. He worked hard and became physically strong. His father recalled how Joseph once walked the forty kilometres home from Helensburgh rather than wait for the steamer back to Glasgow. In a firmament of heroes peopled by James Cook and Joseph Banks, the idea of exploration was always in his mind. In 1837, he enrolled in an astronomy class to get the practical and theoretical knowledge he needed to survey. It was time well spent. Sixty-six years later, when Hooker was eighty-six, he received a telegram from British officers of the Sikkim-Tibet Boundary Commission, including Francis Younghusband and David Prain, who would succeed him at Kew, congratulating Hooker on his surveying efforts there.

William was always on the lookout for his son’s interests, so when at a

friend’s house he met Captain James Clark Ross, commander of a proposed Antarctic voyage, he suggested Joseph be included in the party as a naturalist. Ross agreed, but only if the young man had completed his medical training and served in the Royal Navy. The expedition left Chatham Dockyard in September 1839 and would last almost exactly four years. It remains among the most significant voyages in the history of British exploration. It also made Joseph Hooker’s reputation, not just as a capable and thoughtful botanist, especially on plant distribution, but also as a hugely entertaining correspondent; his letters are among the best of any explorer, shining with energy and interest.

Much had changed by the time the expedition’s two boats Erebus and

Terror finally returned, dropping anchor at Folkestone in September 1843. Hooker’s father had achieved a long-held ambition to become director of Kew and was transforming an institution only recently threatened with closure. Joseph, who learned of his father’s promotion while in Australia, had sent home a stream of exciting new discoveries. In the Antarctic, Hooker learned his older brother Willy had died in

Jamaica of yellow fever and his sister Mary Harriette of consumption. In the aftermath of Hooker’s epic adventure, he developed a friendship

with Darwin that provided one of the most significant correspondences in the history of science. He had met Darwin for the first time in 1839, shortly before he left for Antarctica, walking through Charing Cross with Robert McCormick, who had served on the Beagle and was surgeon on Ross’s ship Erebus. Hooker was now returned from Antarctica ‘well salted’, having shed a little of the Puritan strictness that had characterised his upbringing. Darwin felt increasingly confident in testing his ideas of natural selection on the young botanist. Both had travelled to remote places, like Tierra del Fuego, and Darwin was supportive of Hooker’s Flora Antarctica, his classic work on the expedition’s botanical discoveries.

Despite recently getting engaged and starting a new job, Hooker was

restless. He wanted to travel again and botanise somewhere new and exciting, perhaps in the tropics but certainly in India. He had good contacts there: Hugh Falconer, superintendent of the Botanic Garden at Saharanpur in northern India, was one; Falconer suggested the kingdom of Sikkim as somewhere new to investigate. Another was a botanist friend from student days in Glasgow. Thomas Thomson had served as a doctor during the Anglo-Sikh wars of the 1840s and then been appointed to the commission aimed at settling the border between Ladakh and Tibet. The commission was largely thwarted in its aims, so Thomson had spent much of his time botanising in Ladakh and Zanskar. With the quickening march of economic botany, the transforming technology of Wardian cases and his father’s new position at Kew it seemed the perfect moment for Hooker to explore new frontiers in the world’s highest mountains.

Europeans had been plant collecting in the Himalaya for more than half a

century before Hooker arrived. Collection had been part of George Bogle’s mission to Tibet of 1774, and in 1796 the naturalist Thomas Hardwicke had been part of a collecting mission to Garhwal. Ten years earlier, the Calcutta Botanical Garden had been founded, initially to identify and develop plants of commercial value. By the 1830s the garden had developed a strong scientific foundation, first through William Roxburgh, who introduced mahogany to India, and then the Danish-born surgeon Nathaniel Wallich, whose catalogue of Indian plants exceeded eight thousand. Few went plant hunting in India without consulting Wallich and sending him new species. The Himalaya was now part of this expanding body of botanical knowledge: Edward Gardner sent him plants from the garden of the Kathmandu residency and William Moorcroft from the western Himalaya. Wallich himself had spent the whole of 1821 in Nepal collecting plants and published a short monograph on Nepali botany, Tentamen Florae Napalensis Illustratae. John Forbes Royle, another medical man, was in 1823 made director of the botanic garden at Saharanpur, founded in an old Pashtun palace at the foot of the Himalaya. He worked on the medicinal value of Himalayan plants, publishing Illustrations of the botany and other branches of natural history of the Himalayan mountains and of the flora of Cashmere in 1839. Royle was among the first botanists to suggest that the cinchona tree, the source of the anti-malarial quinine, might be grown in India.

One of the earliest British interventions in Himalayan horticulture was

the humble potato. Warren Hastings had encouraged his Tibet envoy George Bogle to conduct an experiment on his journey through Bhutan, planting potatoes on each stage of his route to see if they would flourish. ‘Don’t return without something to shew where you have been,’ Hastings told him,

though it be but a contraband Walnutt, a pilfered Slip of Sweet Briar, or the Seeds of a Bootea Turnip taken in Payment for the Potatoes you have given them gratis.

Samuel Turner, following in Bogle’s footsteps nine years later, judged the experiment a failure having been shown ‘a small specimen of potatoes’ that had been grown in Bhutan, ‘not bigger than boys’ marbles’. Turner concluded that ‘either from ignorance or idleness’, the people of Bhutan had ‘failed in the cultivation of this valuable root’.

A decade after Samuel Turner’s journey to Tibet, William Kirkpatrick

arrived in Kathmandu on his stillborn mission to mediate between the Gorkhalis and the Qing.

I had heard, before my visit … that our most esteemed kitchen vegetables did not only grow there in much higher perfection than in Bengal, but that the propagation of them was annually continued from their own seed … My disappointment, therefore, was very great on finding the fact otherwise, and on being assured that they

could not raise even potatoes, without procuring every year from Patna fresh roots for sowing; I think it extremely probable, however, that their failure in this respect has been occasioned solely by want of attention or skill, having no doubt … that with proper management, there are few of our hortulan productions, whether fruit, flower, or herb, which might not be successfully reared, and abundantly multiplied … in the valley of Nepaul.

Potatoes had been in India for over a century by that point, introduced by the Portuguese not long after arriving in Europe. They now spread through the Himalaya along with seasonal labourers returning home from British hill stations. Frederick Young, the Irish officer who had commanded the Sirmur batallion in the war with Gorkha, planted potatoes at Mussoorie, the hill station he founded. Kathmandu’s potatoes almost certainly came from Patna. Those in western Nepal arrived from Simla or Naini Tal and in the east from Darjeeling. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, later briefly the superintendent at the Calcutta Botanic Garden, visited Nepal a decade after Kirkpatrick and in one brief comment managed to report that the people of the Himalaya were getting to grips with the potato while at the same time maintaining a prejudice against them:

In the hilly parts of the country Solanum tuberosum [the potato] has been introduced, and grows tolerably; but it does not thrive so well as at Patna, owing probably to a want of care.

Buchanan-Hamilton had made a typically arrogant assumption about the competence of Nepali farmers. In fact, over the next few decades, the introduction of the potato and the success of its cultivation by local farmers would lead to a Himalayan population boom, just as it had in Europe, as experimentation yielded results and subsistence farmers benefitted from more easily won calories. Monasteries in the Himalaya were among the potato’s greatest champions, since its cultivation wasn’t as labour-intensive, and so freed up time for religious duties. Potatoes made the biggest impact at higher altitudes, strengthening the resilience of highland communities like the Sherpa and allowing them to occupy higher habitations through the winter. The crop was so productive that Sherpas didn’t have to commit so much land to get a substantial reward. They learned how to store potatoes in pits, or by drying them in the cold dry air of high altitude for use in stews or trade with Tibet, or else turned them to powder. Even today, potatoes grown in the Everest region are appreciated elsewhere in the country for their taste. The wider Himalayan region has proved astonishingly inventive with the humble alu, as it is known there. As the Nepali writer Ramyata Limbu put it:

People in Palpa are proud of their aloo chukauni [dressed in yoghurt], plains Nepalis enjoy aloo bhujia [spicy potatoes] with roti [flatbread], those living in the highlands salivate over aloo bhat [with rice] and aloo daal [with lentils]. Sometimes even better on a cold, dark winter’s day is plain usineko aloo, boiled potatoes with marcha chillies pounded with salt and garlic. In the realm of the spud, Nepal might well be tops.

The crop that most exercised the East India Company was not potatoes, however, but tea, Camellia sinensis. From the middle of the eighteenth century it had been the most popular drink in Britain, outselling even beer. The British drank a fifth of what the Chinese could grow. Light and easy to transport, tea and the trade in it with China were the foundation of the Company’s fate and consequently part of Britain’s strategic interest: ten per cent of British tax revenues came from the sale of tea, and the East India Company’s tea trade with China was worth as much as all its other business there – from silk to porcelain – put together. Yet in the populist, anti-mercantilist atmosphere of the 1830s, the days of the Company’s monopoly on Asian trade were numbered. In 1834 it lost its monopoly in China and the need to end its reliance on Chinese tea intensified.

It was not that tea didn’t grow in India. Earlier in the nineteenth century,

the Scot Robert Bruce had discovered a plant that looked like tea growing at sea level in Assam. The local Singpho people he met were drinking a brew made from the plant and he tried some: it tasted a bit like tea. In the 1830s, a few years after Robert Bruce’s death, his brother Charles sent the plant to Calcutta to be examined. Bruce had been right: it was tea, but a different variety. Hugh Falconer, Hooker’s contact in India, was by the 1830s superintendent of the botanical gardens at Saharanpur in the modern state of Uttar Pradesh. Falconer’s time there is famous for the fossil hunting he did in the Siwalik hills, finding the first fossilised monkey skull at the foot of the Himalaya, and for his subsequent correspondence with Darwin. But he also conceived the idea of growing Chinese tea in the Himalaya, persuading the Company to explore the idea. A committee was set up and in the Journal of the Asiatic Society, Falconer laid out in magisterial detail the growing conditions found in China and the problems of replicating them on the plains of India. ‘In the Himalaya mountains’, on the other hand,

the case is widely different: excepting periodical rains, all the conditions of a temperate climate are here found, and here above all parts of India, we may look for the successful cultivation of tea.

Part of Falconer’s plan was to acquire tea seeds from China. These duly arrived in 1835 and were dispersed to several sites throughout India to be grown experimentally. George William Traill, in one of his last acts as the commissioner of Kumaon, helped select sites there that would within a few years have expanded to several acres and thousands of tea bushes under Falconer’s watchful eye. A plant collector was also despatched to locate the tea bushes the Bruce brothers had discovered, and Nathaniel Wallich was commissioned to investigate the possibility of growing this indigenous tea in north-east India. At the age of forty-nine, in poor health, Wallich set out for the leech-filled forests of the north-east. With him went John McClelland, ‘a persevering Scotchman, without much ability’ according to Hooker, and William Griffith, a brilliant botanist and capable artist who was far more highly regarded. Wallich couldn’t hide his jealousy of his more able and much younger colleague and had the unfortunate habit of bursting into tears. Eventually he returned to Calcutta and Griffith continued to the Mishmi hills and Lohit valley in the modern state of Arunachal Pradesh.

That year the Company also began growing the indigenous plant in the

highlands of Assam. Falconer insisted that Chinese tea processors were hired to offer their expertise. Unluckily for the East India Company, the men came from a low-quality green tea area and over the years proved mediocre workers and reluctant teachers. Worse, the Assam leaves had a strong, malty flavour, and though there was a flurry of interest when the first cases arrived in London, it didn’t suit a British taste matured on more subtle Chinese tea. The Assam plant’s low productivity also made it uneconomic. Even so, the experiment was not a total failure. The Company was acquiring experience of growing tea in India at a commercial scale, laying the foundation for eventual success.

Since the eighteenth century, the East India Company had been selling

opium to China and buying tea with the proceeds. Not only had this pernicious trade generated colossal revenues for the British government, it was still financing expansion in India, culminating in the mid 1840s with expensive wars against the Sikh Empire on the North-West Frontier. But it was a trade that was growing ever more vulnerable. In 1839 the Qing emperor had cracked down on opium, culminating with the destruction of hundreds of tonnes held by foreign merchants at Canton. At a stroke, foreign merchants lost, in today’s terms, hundreds of millions of dollars. Britain sent gunboats, and despite Qing defiance, China’s feeble navy was overcome. The British used this, the First Opium War, to gain greater access to more Chinese ports in the Treaty of Nanking of 1842, forcing a resentful China to open a little more to foreign influence.

This new relationship was clearly unstable. China’s humiliation, a raw

nerve even now, made for a volatile situation. In 1844, Henry Hardinge, an old soldier who had fought Napoleon, arrived in India as governor general. His time in office was marked by victory over the Sikhs and the Treaty of Amritsar but he also warned of the dangers a wounded China might hold.

It is in my opinion by no means improbable that in a few years the Government of Pekin [Beijing], by legalising the cultivation of Opium in China, where the soil has been already proved equally well adapted with India to the growth of the plant, may deprive this Government of one of its present chief sources of revenue.

In which case, Hardinge argued, it was ‘most desirable to afford every encouragement to the cultivation of Tea in India’. More money and land was made available to speed up the development of India’s tea industry.

The place for this cultivation had now been firmly established. The

middle hills of the eastern Himalaya offered the equivalent of China’s best tea-growing regions: high in altitude, its soils richly nutritious and sufficiently wet, often clouded in dampness and in winter frosty enough to add complexity, sweetness and flavour. While British growers still had no access to China’s tea plantations, the experiments with Chinese seed were starting to bear fruit. Hardinge had given authorisation to commercial plantations at Kangra, in modern Himachal Pradesh, and the new hill station of Darjeeling. The tea was processed, packed and shipped to England, arriving at the Company’s offices on Leadenhall Street in the City of London on 12 January 1848. The tea was sent out to the most important brokers: the House of Twinings, Miller and Lowcock, Gibbs and Peek Brothers. Their verdict, when it came, was hugely encouraging. The tea was a far better proposition than the Assam variety. In fact, it was almost as good as the best from China: almost, but not quite. The only stumbling block was the seed available to Canton wasn’t a patch on that from the best tea-growing areas and the manufacturers lacked the finesse of their Chinese counterparts.

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British imperial wealth rested heavily on botanical knowledge. From spices and dyes to cotton and opium, knowing what plants grew where was the first step in exploiting them. But Joseph Hooker’s ambitions were intellectually wider than commercial exploitation. He wanted to know why plants grew where they did. Understanding the principles – climate, altitude, soil chemistry and so on – that underpinned the geographic distribution of plants meant a greater chance of them thriving elsewhere. That was what he wanted to study in Sikkim. He travelled to India on the navy ship Sidon, docking at Calcutta on the very day that the first batch of Indian-cultivated Chinese tea arrived in Leadenhall. Also on board was the Earl of Dalhousie, Hardinge’s replacement as governor general. Dalhousie was a workaholic widely blamed for the disaster of the 1857 rebellion but someone who also brought the advances of Victorian Britain – the railways and telegraph – to India, tying its disparate regions together just as a national movement sparked into life. Hooker and Dalhousie got on famously, although the botanist’s attempts to interest his distinguished new friend in his subject were hopeless. On the voyage out, stopping briefly in the Middle East, they took a trip into the desert. Hooker found some gum arabic, a significant export from British colonies in Africa, and so perhaps of interest to a former president of the Board of Trade. But Dalhousie ‘chucked it out of the carriage window; and the Rose of Jericho, with an interest about it of a totally different character, met with no better fate’. Tea was another matter.

The Governor-General [Hooker wrote to his father at Kew] hints to me that he would like reports on the Tea districts of India … I need not say that I shall lay myself out to attend to his wishes in India.

While in Calcutta, Hooker spent much time at the botanic gardens where Hugh Falconer had recently been appointed superintendent. Until he arrived, John McClelland was in charge. Hooker found McLelland preparing William Griffith’s journals for publication following Griffith’s death at Malacca three years earlier of a liver parasite, aged just thirty-four. The clash between Griffith and Wallich had caused real damage to the gardens. While Wallich was away on sick leave, Griffith had completely remodelled their layout to better suit a scientific institution and in doing so caused many plants to fail. McLelland had tried to improve things but with only mixed success. ‘The Library is in dreadful confusion, just as Wallich left it, and the Herbarium worse,’ Hooker told his father. He wrote a long letter to Falconer with his recommendations for the future, laying the groundwork for closer cooperation between Kew and Calcutta in the coming years.

In April 1848 the young botanist arrived at Darjeeling, where he would

spend much of the next two years in its ‘Greenock-like climate’. (Darjeeling gets a lot of rain. The diabolist and mountaineer Aleister Crowley, en route for Kangchenjunga, complained: ‘The whole town stinks of mildew.’) Hooker met Brian Houghton Hodgson soon afterwards, in the garden of Hodgson’s bungalow where the former resident of Kathmandu was ‘talking Tibetan to a Chinese-looking man’ about the geography of Central Asia. Hodgson had retired to a forest clearing in the new hill station of Darjeeling, having returned to the Himalaya after an awkward period at home. Despite the concern and love of his family, particularly his sister Fanny, now married to a Dutch district court judge and living in Arnhem, Hodgson had realised he was ‘alienated entirely from European ways from the first to last’. Since returning, he had developed a new interest to set alongside his passion for the birdlife and mammals of the Himalaya: the region’s ethnically and culturally diverse human population. As a kind of proto-anthropologist, he was determined to describe in detail ‘the Aborigines of the frontier in its Mountains and its Tarai’.

Hooker was thirty-one and Hodgson forty-eight but the difference

seemed even greater. Hodgson declared he was plagued with insomnia and Hooker judged his new friend ‘ill & nervous to such a degree that he fancies the Darjeeling doctors want to kill him’. Yet although Hooker told his father that Hodgson was ‘said to quarrel with every one, and in truth is as proud a man as I ever met’, they became firm friends and during the monsoon Hooker came to live with his reclusive mentor. He told his family that they had become like brothers and that he would always regard Hodgson ‘as one of my dearest friends on earth’. Excited to have someone as knowledgeable as Hooker interested in his life’s work, Hodgson was happy to share his knowledge of Himalayan natural history, which Hooker saw as ‘the very best chance for me that could have occurred’. Later, out of gratitude, Hooker would name a species of rhododendron after his friend, despite Hodgson’s protestations.

The young botanist was blessed in having such powerful contacts.

Dalhousie could open political doors and Hodgson furnished him with the knowledge he needed to make the most of his time in Sikkim. Getting permission for his visit was more problematic. The tiny kingdom of Sikkim and its indigenous Lepcha population, with smaller numbers of Limbus and Magars, had been ruled since the mid seventeenth century by the Namgyal family, which originated in eastern Tibet. Rulers were called chogyal, dharma kings, but the geographic space they occupied was vulnerable, surrounded by more aggressive powers: Hooker likened it to Poland, despite its small size. Bhutan had invaded in the early eighteenth century and Sikkim was prey to frequent raids from the Gorkhali regime in Kathmandu. Squeezed from all sides, when the Gorkhas captured the capital at Rabdentse and the chogyal fled to Tibet, Sikkim found support from the Qing, who in 1793 pushed back the Gorkhas and restored the chogyal’s young son to the throne. This was the ruler Hooker would meet as a weakened old man.

As Qing power waned and the British arrived, the chogyal Tsugphud

Namgyal found a new ally against the Gorkha regime. In 1814 the Gorkhalis once again overran Sikkim’s eastern territory, but the East India Company restored the chogyal and in 1817 he signed a treaty with the British. Hooker thought this treaty feeble, since, as he told his mother in a letter that June,

we did not demand even a nominal tribute from the Rajah, who at once fell under the influence of China, whose policy it is to rule the

Councils and hearts, but not the people, of these three Border powers; and by teaching them a wholesome dread of the English, they exclude the latter from these several States and prevent our interfering with the Chinese Trade from the East into Thibet.

This was disingenuous on Hooker’s part. The British had gained plenty. That portion of Sikkim occupied by the Gorkhalis was ceded to the East India Company and in 1835, when the Company decided it also wanted Darjeeling and its district, 2,500 square kilometres of territiory, the chogyal had little option but to accept the terms offered: an annual pension of three thousand rupees. The written contract was short and ambiguous. In the chogyal’s mind, he was being paid rent for Darjeeling; the British regarded the territory as theirs for good.

The man who made Darjeeling was Archibald Campbell. Born on the

Scottish island of Islay, he had studied medicine at Glasgow and Edinburgh and joined the Bengal Medical Service, serving as surgeon under Hodgson in Kathmandu before his appointment as superintendent of the new hill station in 1839. When he arrived in Darjeeling it was ‘an inaccessible tract of forest, with a very scanty population’ but in little more than a decade the energetic Scot had overseen the construction of not just the sanatorium that had inspired its acquisition but a small town as well. A road was built, scores of European houses, a bazaar and jail. A local militia was formed and the practice of forced labour ended. Campbell also experimented with the introduction of new crops, including in 1841 tea acquired from gardens in Kumaon that had planted Chinese seed. (Twenty years later one of these bushes was twenty feet high and fifty feet in circumference.) By 1852, the year the first commercial tea garden was planted, the station was already generating revenues of fifty thousand rupees from farming and forestry, substantially more than the few hundred rupees it had earned the chogyal.

As political agent or officer for Sikkim, Archie Campbell was a

necessary ally for Hooker in getting permission to enter the kingdom. But Campbell had fallen out with Calcutta and was at first reluctant to push the request, much to Hooker’s frustration. ‘The Govt. won’t order Campbell to send me without the Rajah’s consent for fear of a war with China; Campbell won’t run the risk of committing himself without an order!’ Even so, as Campbell was an old friend of Hodgson it was almost inevitable that the two men would get to know each other well during Hooker’s stay in Darjeeling. Campbell’s young children adored Hooker who returned the compliment by naming a rhododendron for their mother, just as he had for Hodgson. While negotiations continued, Hooker explored the hills first around Darjeeling and then further north along the Rangit river, moving beyond British jurisdiction to where it met the Tista. He collected several magnolias, three of which Falconer confirmed were new to science, and three new rhododendrons, ‘one, the most lovely thing you can imagine, a parasite on gigantic trees, three yards high, with whorls of branches, and 3– 6 immense white, deliciously sweet-scented flowers at the apex of each branch’. This he named Rhododendron dalhousiae for his patron in Calcutta.

Hooker’s attitude to the indigenous population was often arrogantly

dismissive, typically so for his race and class, even among men of science. Like Falconer, he regarded the people of India as incapable of ruling themselves. If politics were threatening to thwart his ambitions then why shouldn’t he get involved himself? The chogyal’s ambassadors, Hooker wrote, had been chosen ‘for their insolence and incapacity’. The key figure blocking his progress was Tokhan Namgyal, the new chief minister, a Tibetan married to the chogyal’s illegitimate daughter. In Darjeeling he was called the Pagla Dewan: the ‘crazy minister’. He was certainly anti-British, anxious about the reaction of the Qing envoys in Lhasa to a visit from the neighbouring empire. His conduct Hooker described as ‘Indo-Chinese’: ‘assuming, insolent, aggressive, never perpetrating open violence, but by petty insults effectually preventing all good understanding’. Hooker railed against the Sikkim government for harbouring ‘notorious offenders’ even though the administration at Darjeeling did the same: both authorities were short of labour and took whomever they could get. ‘The Cis-Himalayan Bhoteas,’ he wrote to his father, ‘whether of Sikkim or, worse still, of Bhotan [Bhutan], are as uncouth a race as I ever beheld.’ He wrote more sympathetically of the Lepchas, as most travellers did, and the affection was apparently reciprocated. Henry John Elwes, the next plant hunter to visit Sikkim twenty-two years later said the older Lepchas he met didn’t just remember Hooker but almost worshipped him ‘as an incarnation of high wisdom and kindly strength’.

Thanks to Hodgson’s links to the durbar at Kathmandu, where Jang

Bahadur was now in charge, Hooker got permission in the autumn of 1848 to extend his explorations into eastern Nepal and travel via the Tamur valley as far as the Tibetan border to the west of the vast peak of Kangchenjunga. He left in late October with a retinue of fifty-five and on 26 November reached the Tipta La on the border ‘where he could see nothing of Thibet but had no strength to crawl farther’. He was suffering ‘an excruciating headache’. There had been huge numbers of new plants to collect, including the rhododendron he named for Hodgson, and because of Darwin’s interest, he was also paying close attention to the breeding of yaks. Returning south from the Ghunsa valley on 5 December, at a place Hooker called the ‘Choonjerma pass’, he paused to sketch a view of distant mountains that included Everest, which had been measured that year. Quite where Choonjerma is remains uncertain. The ‘pundit’ Chandra Das believed it was a balcony or terrace close to a pass called on modern maps the Mirgin La. Wherever Hooker stopped, it’s likely he made the first recognisable image of the world’s highest mountain. The setting sun reminded Hooker of the work of Turner, and as it set

the Nepal peaks to the right assumed more definite darker and gigantic forms, and floods of light shot across the misty ocean, bathing the landscape around me in the most wonderful and indescribable changing tints.

On his way back to Darjeeling, Hooker and Campbell had an audience with the ageing chogyal Tsugphud Namgyal and despite his continuing reluctance Hooker was finally granted access to Sikkim. The following May he set out again to explore the country east of Kangchenjunga and the headwaters of the Tista. Hooker’s presence in Sikkim exposed the fault-lines among the chogyal’s ministers. The minister, or dewan, Tokhan Namgyal opposed foreign interference and did what he could to impede Hooker, but the dewan had a rival: Tsepa Adan, known to the British as Chebu Lama, whose clan had its origins in eastern Tibet but had over the generations intermarried with Lepchas. Because of this, Chebu was more popular within Sikkim but had, rather like Thomas Wolsey, got into trouble trying to fix the chogyal’s lack of an heir. He wanted an accommodation with the British, and worked in Hooker’s interest, accompanying him and intervening at critical moments. This jostling for position reached its climax in early November, as Hooker and Campbell tried to cross the Cho La, a pass of over fifteen thousand feet on the Tibetan border. The dewan saw their actions as a provocation too far and had his men arrest Campbell, keeping him bound. By twisting the ropes that tied him, his captors compelled Campbell to write to the governor general with their demands. Back in Darjeeling, Hodgson wrote to Hooker’s parents to reassure them their son was not involved, but he lost much of his collection, and equipment was stolen or damaged.

Campbell was not imprisoned for long. When the East India Company

promised ‘a severe retribution’ Hooker and his party were delivered back to Darjeeling just in time for Christmas. The dewan, thinking the whole matter closed, even came with them to do some pony trading. The government in Calcutta had little sympathy for Campbell; he was judged the architect of his own misfortune. One official thought Campbell’s actions ‘a grave indiscretion’ likely to antagonise the Chinese. A senior army officer thought it perfectly understandable that hill people would be suspicious of a European surveying their territory. Predictably, Dalhousie promoted him. Hooker, now realising the consequences of his pressure on Campbell to force their way into Sikkim, was a little chastened. Even so, for reasons of prestige Dalhousie ordered a response that was swift and stern. A powerful military force took up positions on the north bank of the Rangit against a small Buddhist nation with no army worth the name. The annual payment to Sikkim was stopped. Hundreds of square kilometres of Sikkim’s terai, its most productive land, was annexed and put under the jurisdiction of Darjeeling. As the official in Calcutta noted: ‘A weak power between great powers must doubly suffer.’

Even before Hooker arrived back in Britain, the field sketches, dried

plants and descriptions he sent home to Kew allowed his father to publish The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya, with illustrations worked up by the Scot, Walter Hood Fitch. This talented botanical artist had worked for William Hooker in Glasgow and then followed him to Kew, where he illustrated more or less everything they published. The rhododendrons were planted in Kew’s hollow way, which became known as ‘rhododendron dell’, or else shared with botanical gardens across Europe. Rhododendrons had been known in Europe since the sixteenth century and Linnaeus had classified a small number of species in the mid eighteenth, but Hooker’s publication and their presence at Kew helped spark a fascination for the plants. They fitted neatly into a changing fashion in British gardens for hardier, more naturalistic planting and proved popular on shooting estates, where they offered game birds cover.

In 1855 Hooker, whose Himalayan Journals and rhododendron book had

received critical acclaim, was appointed assistant to his father at Kew. Over the next few years he became one of the great figures in economic botany, actively involved in transplanting some of the world’s most valuable plants around the globe in Wardian cases and remaking how the world did business. The plant hunter Richard Spruce and Clements Markham, who later ran the Royal Geographical Society and launched the career of the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, brought the cinchona tree, source of the anti-malarial quinine, back to Kew from the Andes. Thousands of seedlings were grown and distributed to experimental sites including Darjeeling, where, against Hooker’s expectations, it flourished. The cost of quinine plummeted, becoming affordable even for the poor. Cork oaks went to the Punjab, chocolate to Ceylon, Liberian coffee to the West Indies. There were crazes for rhododendrons and orchids. But the greatest prize, in economic terms at least, was rubber. Hooker persuaded the government to back expeditions to acquire seeds of the tree, Hevea brasiliensis, from the Amazon to grow them at Kew. After years of effort, seedlings were shipped to Malaya and Sri Lanka, establishing a lucrative colonial industry that materially affected Britain’s ability to fight two world wars. (Years later, a tea planter ruefully told Hooker that at the start of his working life he had failed to follow Hooker’s advice to go into rubber and had consequently missed out on a fortune.)

The tea industry would be among the first to benefit from the rapid

advances in botanical knowledge and technology. In May 1848, as Joseph Hooker explored the hills of Darjeeling, the former superintendent of Saharanpur’s botanical garden John Forbes Royle paid a visit to the Chelsea Physic Garden in London. The verdict of the famous tea brokers on Indian-grown Chinese tea had just arrived: it was good, but not quite good enough. Now the East India Company had a new strategy: go to China and acquire samples from the best plants and everything else deemed necessary to finish the task of establishing viable commercial tea plantations in India. As the Company’s chief botanist, Royle’s task in Chelsea was to persuade the man best qualified for that job, one that would likely prove almost impossibly difficult and no less dangerous.

Not all early Victorian plant hunters were doctor–botanists. Some of the

greatest were working-class gardeners who had served long apprenticeships. They were intelligent and knowledgeable but had no formal scientific education. Among these, Robert Fortune was the shining example. Born in the tiny Berwickshire village of Edrom, his father was a farm worker and his formal education began and ended at the local parish school. He was apprenticed to a local nurseryman, moved to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Edinburgh under head gardener William McNab and then to the Horticultural Society’s garden at Chiswick, where he took charge of the indoor plants. He was cool-headed, ambitious and deeply skilled, so when the Horticultural Society decided to take advantage of easier access in China, following the Treaty of Nanking, they knew just the man to send. Fortune arrived in Hong Kong in May 1843 and spent the next three years collecting in northern China, bringing back to Europe the winter-flowering jasmine, the kumquat, a fan-palm presented to Victoria for her thirty-second birthday and best of all, the legendary double yellow rose, stolen from a mandarin’s garden. Despite such riches, the public might never have heard of him were it not for his hugely entertaining travelogue Three Years’ Wandering, with its show-stopping account of how he took on a fleet of pirates single-handed to protect his specimens. The East India Company was more interested in his two chapters about the Chinese tea industry. No European had seen or knew more of Chinese tea.

Fortune’s first expedition had not helped him live up to his name. His pay

had been a miserly £100 per annum and the Horticultural Society had been reluctant to provide firearms for him to defend himself as he travelled. They were more used to gentlemen who came with their own guns and didn’t rely on being paid. Yet his immense success did win him the directorship of the Chelsea Physic Garden, which he proceeded to improve wholesale. The job wasn’t lucrative but it came with a house and other benefits and more importantly didn’t involve risking his life. The notion of intellectual property barely existed in 1848 but Fortune knew very well that what he was being asked to do by John Forbes Royle wasn’t so much plant collecting as industrial espionage. He also knew what could happen if he were caught. The East India Company would have to offer a much better deal to persuade him back to China – and it did: five times his previous salary, free passage and Fortune could keep whatever else he collected to sell to the growing market of wealthy gardeners, who already knew China as a treasure trove. All he had to do was deliver what the Company needed.

Disguising himself as a merchant and masking his indifferent Chinese

accent by claiming to be from whatever region was furthest from where he was, Fortune completed his mission. Even when the East India Company killed the vast majority of the thousands of tea plants he sent in his first batch, he didn’t give up. Told that all the seeds he sent had proved unviable, Fortune developed an ingenious method of transporting them in the soil of a mulberry bush inside a Wardian case so that when Falconer received them more than twelve thousand plants had germinated. Despite the setbacks and the subterfuge, he not only delivered viable plants, he also sourced all the best equipment necessary and hired Chinese tea growers who not only knew what they were doing but were prepared to teach others. The Indian tea industry, thanks to Fortune, finally reached critical mass and exploded into life. The Himalaya would never be the same again.

In little more than a decade, ten thousand acres around Darjeeling were

planted with tea in thirty-nine gardens. Some of Darjeeling’s most famous tea gardens were founded in this period: Happy Valley, formerly the Wilson Tea Estate, founded by the Englishman David Wilson in 1854; Glenburn, named by the Scot Kimble Murray, its first manager; Makaibari, in the Bengali Banerjee family for four generations. (Narendra Modi presented Queen Elizabeth with a packet of Makaibari tea when they met in 2018.) In the rush to plant tea, tree cover in the region largely disappeared. What had been largely undisturbed forest thirty years before was simply gone. Yet the impact on the people of the Himalaya was even greater. More trees could be planted, and were; Darjeeling’s hunger for workers, on the other hand, would uproot communities in ways that would change society and politics for good. In 1839, when Archie Campbell arrived, there were around a hundred people in the district of Darjeeling. Ten years later, when Hooker was in Sikkim, the population was ten thousand. In 1871, when the first official census was done, it had climbed to 94,712. Ten years later, the year the railway arrived in Darjeeling, a more reliable census recorded 155,179. Ten years after that, in 1891, the figure had risen to 223,314. The town of Darjeeling itself was by then more than sixteen thousand strong and had been made Calcutta’s summer capital, home to some of India’s best private schools: St Paul’s and the Jesuit college St Joseph’s, where kings of Nepal and Bhutanese nobles went to school, as well as the novelist Lawrence Durrell.

This spiralling population growth was driven largely by the expansion of

the tea industry. At the time of the 1891 census forty-five thousand acres were under tea in 177 gardens and they all needed large workforces. These came from all the neighbouring countries but by far the greatest proportion came from Nepal, often with the assistance of Nepali leaders who were rewarded with parcels of land. In the 1891 census, eighty-eight thousand were recorded as Nepali, almost certainly an underestimation. The majority were Rais, Tamangs and Limbus, and some Newari merchants as well, Tibeto-Burmese ethnic groups with their own religious traditions disadvantaged by a stratified society that favoured the dominant Khas. There were migrants from Sikkim and Bhutan, and from across the mountains in Tibet. The district of Darjeeling had become a new frontier, once sparsely populated, now a polyglot, multicultural experiment. You could escape debts, bad marriages or the boredom of village life in Darjeeling. It became a magnet, a new centre of gravity in the eastern Himalaya. In the British imagination, Darjeeling is about colonial life, like an extended episode of The Jewel in the Crown. Yet the European population was tiny in comparison to the tens of thousands of migrants starting new lives in a world where the rules of home were powerfully changed. It’s hardly surprising that Darjeeling became a Himalayan cultural and literary melting pot, though when independence came in 1947 this Nepali population would find itself fighting for political space.

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If tea changed the landscape of the Himalaya, then the Himalaya also changed the landscape of Europe and North America, or at least their gardens. In 1866 the now Royal Horticultural Society organised the most expensive international plant show in history. Despite the cold London weather, it was a smash, so popular in fact that it managed to turn a profit. The exhibition was sponsored and organised in part by the prominent Victorian plant nursery James Veitch & Sons, which had made a fortune furnishing the gardens of the aristocracy. Through the 1860s, Veitch had sponsored plant hunters to travel the world looking for new species for its wealthy clients, particularly South America and Japan, where John Gould Veitch had climbed Mount Fuji before bringing back the largest collection of Japanese conifers yet collected and important new maples as well. (He shared the voyage home with Robert Fortune, who had been on a similar mission.) This was still the era of Joseph Paxton, Victorian Britain’s head gardener, who had died the year before: huge formal gardens adorned with hugely expensive and finicky bedding plants grown under glass. The philosophy of this extravagance was clear from the Lord Mayor of London’s speech at the 1866 exhibition banquet:

It has been said that Nature, so fair and bounteous in herself, needs not the hand of man to train and cultivate her; but Nature in every shape requires cultivation.

Resistance to such unnatural extravagance came from an Irish gardener called William Robinson, who founded what the biographer Nicola Shulman has dubbed ‘the horticultural lodge of the Arts and Crafts movement’. In 1870 he published The Wild Garden, which advocated more naturalistic planting and an end to labour-intensive and expensive ‘bedding out’. Nature should lead the way, he argued, and that meant relying on plants more suited to Britain’s temperate climate. He championed herbaceous borders, planted with shrubs and perennials to lighten the workload for ordinary gardeners, but while he spoke out for native plants, he also saw a role for other parts of the world that were suited to the northern European climate. That’s where the Himalaya came in, since altitude acts in many ways like latitude. Unlike tropical species from South America, Himalayan plants were much more the ‘natural, hardy species’ Robinson had in mind, like the rhododendron, which flowered beautifully but resisted frost.

This growing fashion for hardy plants and more naturalistic planting

offered a final glorious flourish to a world of Himalayan plant hunting that was now facing decline. In 1906 Joseph Hooker wrote to a colleague deploring the decline of botany in India in comparison to other parts of the British Empire. There were exceptions. Inspired by Hooker, the British Association organised an expedition to Sikkim that included the gigantic Henry John Elwes, botanist, butterfly collector and former Scots Guard, whose booming voice was best experienced from a distance. And in 1906, the same year Hooker complained of the parlous state of Indian botany – ‘Excuse my growl. I do love Indian Botany. I long to see another Griffith’ – the Kew botanist Isaac Henry Burkill also visited Sikkim. The following year he was in Nepal, the first trained botanist to visit the Kathmandu valley since Wallich more than eighty years earlier, collecting some four hundred species. Later Burkill was attached as botanist to a punitive security operation in the Abor Hills of modern Arunachal Pradesh against the Adi people, ethnic Tibetans who resented British control. This was country both Griffith and Hooker had explored, the latter, after his expedition to Sikkim, in the company of his friend Thomas Thomson. Yet Hooker was right when he wrote how ‘the contrast between India and China in this respect is deplorable, especially as I am sure that many of the new Chinese plants will be found in the E Himal’.

For several decades, the botanists discovering those plants in the eastern

Himalaya weren’t British but French. The Lazarist missionary Armand David, known as Père David, is well known for the colossal study he made of China’s natural history. That work included botanising along the eastern fringes of the Himalaya in what is now western Sichuan during his second collecting expedition, which began in the spring of 1868 and lasted over two years. His most famous discoveries were the giant panda and the handkerchief tree, whose whole genus, now named Davidia in his honour, was new to western science. Yet the breadth of the herbarium he collected was no less impressive. A native of the Pyrenees, he had as a father a doctor with a broad interest in natural history, who taught his son well. David was a brilliant naturalist. He sent 676 plant specimens from Sichuan to the natural history museum in Paris where the botanist Adrien Franchet discovered among them a hundred and fifty new species: a dozen rhododendrons, including Rhododendron aureum, primulas, violets, cotoneasters and willow. Despite suffering ‘more fatigues, pains, privations, and diseases, than it is advisable to say’, Père David reached Beijing via the Qinghai plateau just so he could see for himself the turquoise waters of Kokonor, the largest lake in China.

Other French missionaries followed David’s example, the most

remarkable being Jean-Marie Delavay, who like David grew up in mountains but on the other side of France in Haute-Savoie, where he developed a lifelong passion for alpine flowers. He arrived in Canton in 1867 and, to begin with, gave whatever he collected to the British consul Henry Hance, who shared his passion for botany. During a trip home in 1881, he met Père David who persuaded him to collect instead for the Paris natural history museum’s Adrien Franchet and la patrie. The change galvanised Delavay and when he returned to China in 1882 he based himself in north-west Yunnan, possibly the first European to visit the deep gorges of what was then a remote region of the far eastern Himalaya. He worked alone, like David, amassing a vast collection of dried specimens, the finest, Franchet said, he had ever seen, comprising four thousand species of largely alpine flora, of which fifteen hundred were new discoveries. Among these was the blue poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia, which Franchet described. Seeds from this were grown at the botanic gardens in Edinburgh, then enjoying a golden period under the directorship of Isaac Bayley Balfour. (Whether this meconopsis and Meconopsis baileyi are the same species is a matter of debate; betonicifolia was on display in London in 1926.)

Without the retinue of helpers other plant hunters relied on to carry

equipment and specimens, the amount of material Delavay collected from each species was small and as a result only a few of his discoveries were successfully introduced into Europe. That task fell to the next generation of plant hunters in the eastern Himalaya: the Dutch-born American Frank N Meyer, working for the US Department of Agriculture, a new entrant to the world of Himalayan exploration; Ernest Henry Wilson, who went to Yunnan for James Veitch & Sons to find the fabled dove tree, Davidia involucrata, and later worked for the Arnold Arboretum in Boston; and George Forrest, a Scot recruited by Bayley Balfour, who was the most successful collector in Yunnan, one of the most biodiverse regions on earth. Forrest got help along the way from the French missionary Jules Dubernard who had by then lived in the upper Mekong valley for forty years, converting former slaves to Christianity. On his first collecting expedition to Yunnan in 1905, Forrest witnessed the aftermath of a violent insurrection by Tibetan monks, triggered in part by the British invasion of Tibet the year before, against Christian missionaries and Qing officials. Having fled the rebel monks, Forrest returned to discover that Dubernard had been decapitated and he was himself a hunted man.

As the Qing dynasty began its death spiral, China’s Tibetan marches

became increasingly dangerous for plant hunters. William Purdom, the tall and likeable son of a Northumberland gardener, had steadily worked his way up from garden boy to the post of junior foreman at Kew. Having been fired, apparently without reasonable cause, he went to work for Veitch and the Arnold Arboretum, collecting in Gansu, the province bordering the north-west Tibetan plateau. Though the collecting was mixed, Purdom proved a talented photographer, capturing some of the only images of the ‘old dance’ festival at Chone monastery, when the spirits of the dead return. Chone sat at the heart of an independent Tibetan enclave with its own lineage of rulers dating back to its founding in the late thirteenth century as a Sakya monastery under the patronage of Kublai Khan. Purdom showed an ethnographer’s eye, catching echoes of this deep history in his photographs.

Purdom was back in Gansu in 1914 with Reginald Farrer, the man who

inspired the rage for rock gardens, a fashion more recently back in favour. Farrer was short, almost dwarfish, and was born with a cleft lip, which he later concealed behind a moustache, although the psychological scars of so many painful operations and the pity of strangers would never leave him. Educated at home in Yorkshire, where his family owned Ingleborough Hall, and then Balliol College, Oxford, he was after making as big a mark as possible and fretted against his conventionally prosperous family. What he wanted, according to his biographer Nicola Shulman, ‘was to be a literary figure of grand repute’; what he became was a lively, endearing gardening writer, whose tendency, more than usual, was ‘to write about himself, no matter what the ostensible subject’.

Hunting for plants in the Himalaya had been a lifetime’s ambition for

Farrer and with the public profile he acquired in championing rock gardens it became possible. His original intention had been Yunnan but when he put out feelers for financial backing he discovered from Isaac Bayley Balfour at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh that not only would he not give the amateur Farrer any money but Frank Kingdon-Ward and George Forrest were already hard at work in Yunnan scooping up anything and everything of value. He should go to Gansu instead. Farrer was tougher than he looked, but even so, it was his great good fortune that Purdom also signed up for the adventure. He had been to Gansu before, was tough and brave, knew photography and was happy to let Farrer beat their drum.

Farrer and Purdom discovered Gansu – always bandit country – in the

grip of a rebellion that had tipped northern China into chaos. Its insurgent leader, Bai Lang, had been trained in Japan to undermine the new Chinese republic that had replaced the last Qing emperor. His name sounds similar to the Mandarin for ‘white wolf ’, which is how Farrer and Purdom termed their adversary. Purdom found himself ambushed by two hundred of Bai Lang’s men who shot dead two of his ponies. He returned fire and then scarpered. In his account of their journey, On the Eaves of the World, Farrer included a photograph of a rakish Purdom, dressed as a local bandit. The pair also found themselves in trouble when a storm destroyed the crops of local villages. The powerful head lama of the local monastery ordered retribution and Purdom and Farrer were confronted by an angry mob brandishing matchlocks. Purdom was able to charm their way out.

If the risks were great, the rewards were magical: Viburnum fragans, also

known as V. farreri, still hugely popular in British gardens, its pink-tinged white flowers described by Farrer as ‘blushing stars’; a new buddleia with lavender flowers and the scent of raspberries that ‘hugs only the very hottest and driest crevices, cliffs, walls, and banks down the most arid and torrid aspects of the Ha Shin Fang’; and the tree peony, Paeonia rockii, with its ‘single, enormous blossom, waved and crimped into the boldest grace of line, of absolutely pure white, with featherings of deepest maroon radiating at the base of the petals from the boss of golden fluff at the flower’s heart’. Farrer didn’t collect any of its seeds and the explorer and botanist Joseph Rock has been credited with its introduction, although it’s debated whether what Farrer saw and what Rock collected were the same plants. Rock’s peony was collected in 1926, the year of the blue poppy craze, from the garden of Chone monastery, which Purdom had photographed years before. There was, however, no way for Farrer and Rock to compare notes: Reginald Farrer was already dead, aged forty, in the mountains of Upper Burma, succumbing in the autumn of 1920 to infection and heavy drinking. As though her son had fallen on the horticultural equivalent of the Western Front, Farrer’s mother dedicated a small fountain to him in the gardens of Ingleborough Hall with the inscription: ‘He died for love and duty, in search of rare plants.’

Frank Kingdon-Ward’s 1924 expedition to Tibet’s mysterious Tsangpo

gorges, accompanied by the young aristocrat John Campbell, fifth Earl Cawdor, was a coda to the Romantic age of Himalayan plant hunting. Along with sober commissions from Kew and the Natural History Museum, he also agreed to collect seeds for the thirteenth Dalai Lama to grow in the gardens of his summer palace, the Norbulingka, sending primula and meconopsis seeds: ‘showy plants’ that ‘could be easily raised’. When Kingdon-Ward first saw the blue poppy, flowering among bushes some three hundred kilometres east of Lhasa, he thought at first he’d seen the plumage of some fabulous bird. ‘The flowers,’ he wrote, ‘flutter out from amongst the sea-green leaves like blue-and-gold butterflies.’ Although he would spend the rest of his life exploring the highlands of Asia, and Himalayan botany is no less relevant today, in the public’s imagination there would never be another moment quite like Kingdon-Ward’s discovery. The blue poppy proved the perfect emblem of the Himalaya as a remote Eden, and the bloom of that vision was never as strong.

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