I'm reprising my old Dirt Diva's Gardening columns and adding them into the website. I hope you'll enjoy them. This is a relearning how to manage my website project, so, bear with me ;)
Meconopsis x sheldonii 'Lingholm' in the nursery area. Adventure, murder, shoot outs, hostile native peoples, debilitating diseases, dangerous wild carnivores, passion, treachery, jealousy . . . uh, yes . . . we are going to talk about plants. Actually, I was thinking about plant hunters and their fantastic exploits, near death experiences, many actual deaths, and unbelievably hair-raising adventures all in the name of finding the new ‘new’ plants for our gardens! While we have our noses stuck in catalogs hunting for our latest garden acquisitions from the dry comfort of an armchair, we rarely have a clue where they came from. These horticultural heroes are the Indiana Joneses of botany without whom there would be no blue poppies, or the monarch of the Northwest timber industry, Pseudotsuga menziesii, the Douglas fir.
Douglas endured conditions that even the most seasoned soldier would find trying. Hunger, cold, wound infections, grizzlies, constantly fording icy rivers, and uneasy relations with the local Indians were the order of the day in his professional life. Did I mention the mosquitoes? In 1826 he covered a staggering 3,932 miles by foot, horse, and canoe. On his last Pacific coast expedition his canoe overturned on the Frazier River where he was thrown into a whirlpool for over an hour. He survived, barely, but, he lost all of his notes, plant collections, and belongings. His journal contained the most extensive botanical field notes and maps of his California expedition - a serious loss to botanical science. On his way home to England, he stopped over in Hawaii where he met his final match in a cattle trap. Gored to death in the pit by a wild bull, David Douglas lived every minute of his 36 years. His discoveries gave us California poppies, the Noble fir, flowering currants, and varieties of conifers that would transform English landscape design.
Primula florindae. The plant hunters in the highlands of central Asia introduced many of the more exotic species of plants found in our gardens. The seeds of the dazzling sky blue Himalayan blue poppy (Meconopsis betonicifolia) were collected in 1924 by the Englishman Frank Kingdon-Ward in southern Tibet. Kingdon-Ward cut his botanist’s teeth on China, braving areas seething with the violence of the Boxer Rebellion, armies of leeches that ‘entered literally every orifice except my mouth’, bouts of malaria, buried in a collapsed house, and getting horribly lost in the bargain. Considering his paralyzing fear of heights and his many horrific falls- one slide down a mountain only stopped by crashing into a tree and finally impaling his armpit on a bamboo spike just above a tiny ledge- he was an inexhaustible collector in the Himalayan mountains of a wide variety of exotic plants. During World War II he was attached to Special Operations Executive with the mission to create safe military corridors through Burma and later trained airmen in jungle survival at the School of Jungle Warfare in India. He made twenty-two plant hunting expeditions that spanned over forty-five years. It’s exhausting just to read about it! A prolific writer as well, of his many tomes he’s perhaps best known for his books Land of the Blue Poppy, The Mystery Rivers of Tibet, and Plant Hunter’s Paradise. He collected over 200 species including about 22 previously unknown. While we are more familiar with the blue poppies, he is perhaps best known for the primulas and rhododendrons he collected. Perhaps you have the lovely butter yellow Primula florindae in your garden?
Armchair adventurers will enjoy reading The Plant Hunters: Two Hundred Years of Adventure. . ., by Toby Musgrave, C. Gardner, and W. Musgrave, 1998; The Plant Hunters: Tales of the Botanical Explorers. . ., by Tyler Whittle, 1997; and The Gardener’s Atlas, by Dr. John Grimshaw, 2002. The website www.PlantExplorers.com covers much of the same territory as these books and is a wonderful resource. Oliver Tooley’s comprehensive website, www.geocities.com/tooleywatkins/fkbiog1.html, about his grandfather Frank Kingdon-Ward is chock full of photos and even more hair-raising adventures of plant hunting along with the modern melodrama of family life when your husband’s in the wilds of Burma. Happy hunting!
Copyright 2006 all rights reserved. Brooke Heppinstall
Armchair adventurers will enjoy reading The Plant Hunters: Two Hundred Years of Adventure. . ., by Toby Musgrave, C. Gardner, and W. Musgrave, 1998; The Plant Hunters: Tales of the Botanical Explorers. . ., by Tyler Whittle, 1997; and The Gardener’s Atlas, by Dr. John Grimshaw, 2002. The website www.PlantExplorers.com covers much of the same territory as these books and is a wonderful resource. Oliver Tooley’s comprehensive website, www.geocities.com/tooleywatkins/fkbiog1.html, about his grandfather Frank Kingdon-Ward is chock full of photos and even more hair-raising adventures of plant hunting along with the modern melodrama of family life when your husband’s in the wilds of Burma. Happy hunting!
Copyright 2006 all rights reserved. Brooke Heppinstall
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