Professor Yin Kaipu gives a sharp command to the driver of our Land Cruiser as we maneuver a narrow road above the roiling Min River. The driver brakes, and Yin, a plant ecologist at the Chengdu Institute of Biology, leaps from the car, oblivious to trucks flashing their lights and swerving to avoid him; his eyes are fixed on boulders in a landslide that years ago crashed down this steep river valley in the Hengduan Mountains of the Sichuan Province in China. Yin clambers up the rocks, scans the terrain, then turns to give us a thumbs-up.
“He’s found it,” says Diane Chang, my interpreter and the director of the Institute of Human Ecology Engineering in Beijing. More cautiously than the professor, we make our way down the highway and climb the slope to see Yin’s discovery.
“Here,” he says, presenting me with the long, olive-green stalk of a lily with two fat seed pods dangling from its stem. “Wilson’s lily. I think he found it right here. And see, his lilies are everywhere.” Yin sweeps his hand toward the masses of tall, brown-and-gold, pencil-thick lilies that sprout around us from every crevice. They are all one species, Lilium regale, distinguished by fragrant clusters of golden-throated white trumpets. The regal lily is now a common sight in public and private gardens throughout America and England. But the plant was familiar only to the farmers and passing traders of the Min River valley until August 1910, when Ernest Henry Wilson, a British plant hunter, visited this site. There was no highway at that time, just a trail wide enough for a mule train to snake above the river. Wilson had a staff of a dozen men, a caravan of 15 mules, a sedan chair (a status symbol he seldom used, preferring to walk), and quantities of gear, most of it materials for preserving the bulbs and seeds of plants, shrubs, and trees.
Wilson’s mission was to find and collect plants that not only could be adapted for garden use but would also survive the bitter chill of a British or New England winter. In retrospect, he was successful beyond measure. “When you look at modern gardens today . . . there’s scarcely one without a plant from China,” says John Simmons, retired curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. “And most will have a plant that Wilson first collected.”
They include many common garden plants that people in the United States tend to think of as purely American, such as various forsythia bushes, clematis vines, rhododendrons, dogwoods, and primroses. Altogether Wilson collected some 65,000 plant specimens, representing at least 1,500 species, during four trips to the rugged Chinese mountains. “China is, indeed, the Mother of Gardens,” he wrote in a book bearing the same title. “For of the countries to which our gardens are most deeply indebted she holds the foremost place. . . . To China the flower lover owes the parents of the modern Rose, be they Tea or Hybrid Tea, Rambler or Polyantha; likewise his . . . Peaches, Oranges, Lemons and Grapefruit.”
