RISKING LIFE FOR A FLOWER

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 44, 20 August 1938, Page 27

RISKING LIFE FOR A FLOWER

Until T heard a girl talking a week or-two^|>ack about the adventures she had experienced in Peru searching for the scarlet gentian I had always regarded;^, botanist and the planthunter as timid, ineffective folk, writes S. <P. B. Mais in the "Daily Mail." But this girl, name I never caught, fired my imagination. Just to make it possible for you and for me to wander round our gardens and point proudly to our latest acquisition1 in gentian |his girl took a, mule across the high5,, narrow passes of the Andes, watched her animal slip from under her and turn a somersault over the edge'of a precipice, stooa at 17,000 ft looking down 12,000 ft into the crater of an active, volcano, and apparently skidded most of the way home on volcahic gcree. She. : endured forced, marches, at heights where all bteathing became a torture, sbleiy to.bring back for a suburban garden lilies of yellow and orange and this scarlet gentian. It is most; significant that I should have failed to catch her name. Almost alone amorig modern explorers, the botanists beat no drums. You remember the way that spectacled; middle-aged Leicester scientist, Henry Walter Bates, disappeared without fuss up the Amazon and remained there for eleven years, enduring the most frightful privations with-

lout a word, to return with no fewer than 14,712 specimens of plants, flowj'ers, and insects, of which 8000 were, before his discovery of them, completely unknown. At the annual general meeting of the Royal Horticultural Society this year mention was made of the collec--tors at. work under Professor Hu, of Peking University, men who spend their lives in the wild and unexplored parts of China, in the Himalayas, Siberia, and other outposts of Asia. But when I went to see them, neither the Royal Horticultural Society nor the Linnaean Society was able to furnish' me with specific details. I was told, however, of Robert Fortune's three yeax's' wanderings in China in 1848-51 in search of clematis, anemone, japonica, and aconite. I heard.of Douglas's strange death, met by falling into a trap set for a bull, and then being gored to death by the bull that was in it. We owe the lovely Tibetan blue poppy t.o Captain Kingdon Ward, and hundreds of hitherto unknown species of rhododendron, primulas, gentian, aconite, asters, begonias, clematis, delphiniums, and irises. Sometimes he achieves a treasure, as, for instance, the glossy chocolatebrown slipper orchid with a white and green standard, only to lose it and have to return years afterwards to retrieve it. This particular flower took him eight years to collect and is now widely known as the Cypripedium wardii.