Eastern gardens grow West
A new Chinese TV documentary traces the journey of flowering plants from China to places afar, Xu Fan reports.
Traveling from Paris to London by train, he interviewed some British botanists and gardeners during his stay in France.
From Sandra Knapp, a botanist at the Natural History Museum, to Richard Deverell, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and a few experts, Huang and his team heard stories about the different plant species taken from China to the United Kingdom.
The UK's "plant hunters" were controversial explorers, who sometimes risked their own safety to find exotic plants in other countries and transform gardens in the UK between the 17th and 19th centuries.
Among them was Scottish surgeon James Cunningham, the first European who sailed around nine months to arrive in Xiamen, Fujian province, and took back many botanical specimens, including camellias, to the British Isles in 1669.
George Forrest, another British planter, is featured in the documentary.
From 1904 to 1932, he undertook seven expeditions to forests and mountains in China, and returned to the UK with more than 30,000 dried plant specimens, as well as over 1,000 living plants and more than 10,000 seed samples.
