The stories of how familiar plants arrived in our plots help add swash and buckle to gardens. The German plant hunter Philipp Seibold, who gave western gardens the flowering cherry Prunus x sieboldii, was arrested and accused of high treason in Japan; the Scot David Douglas, famed for the Douglas fir, died in 1834 when he fell down a bull pit trap in Hawaii; and his compatriot George Forrest, who collected thousands of plants from China including the early flowering Camellia saluenensis, escaped with two arrows through his hat after the rest of his party was killed in Yunnan in 1905.
Inspired by these planterly adventures I joined an RHS Plant Seekers’ tour to explore the flora in a Yunnan valley nudging up towards the borders with Tibet and Myanmar where some of the west’s 10,000 or so Chinese garden plants and flowers originate.
It was October, a hopeless month for flower blooms, but even if we’d been there in late spring — when beauties like the scented, deep crimson tree peony Paeonia delavayi bloom — little is guaranteed in the plant world.