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Zusatztext “If there is a better writer about the garden than he! I do not know who that would be. . . . This collection . . . is a joyous event.” —from the Preface by Jamaica Kincaid Informationen zum Autor Edited and with an Introduction by Tom Christopher Klappentext A Modern Library Paperback Original During the first years of the twentieth century, the British plant collector and explorer Frank Kingdon Ward went on twenty-four impossibly daring expeditions throughout Tibet, China, and Southeast Asia, in search of rare and elusive species of plants. He was responsible for the discovery of numerous varieties previously unknown in Europe and America, including the legendary Tibetan blue poppy, and the introduction of their seeds into the world's gardens. Kingdon Ward's accounts capture all the romance of his wildly adventurous expeditions, whether he was swinging across a bottomless gorge on a cable of twisted bamboo strands or clambering across a rocky scree in fear of an impending avalanche. Drawn from writings out of print for almost seventy-five years, this new collection, edited and introduced by professional horticulturalist and House & Garden columnist Tom Christopher, returns Kingdon Ward to his deserved place in the literature of discovery and the literature of the garden. chapter i The Plant Hunter Defined Kingdon Ward had no illusions about his qualifications as a horticulturist, botanist, or geographer. He had none, in the conventional sense. Indeed, as someone who remained at heart an outsider all his life, Kingdon Ward seems to have relished this fact. In any event, he knew that the essential qualifications for his work were not university degrees, but rather an ability to withstand hardship and an insatiable appetite for the hunt. If Kingdon Ward had few illusions about himself, he also was keenly aware of the error into which his work could easily stray. It seems paradoxical, but this man who introduced so many novelties into Western gardens reserved his own admiration for those plants that were, or could become, most common. Here, reader, you will perhaps perceive a hint of solitude. Plant hunting is not like big-game hunting. It is a job, undertaken for bread and butter as well as for love of flowers, and its less pleasant aspects have to be faced as well as its advantages. The plant hunter does not make up a cheery party of congenial spirits, and go off for three months on full pay. He goes alone, and for a year or two; he goes not days, but weeks and months without seeing or speaking to another white man. And sometimes it hurts. My own qualifications were somewhat vague. Up to the time when I first embarked upon plant hunting as a career, horticulture was one of the things I had not studied. I was more interested in engines than in how to cultivate plants. And my principal qualification for the job I undertook was, that I happened to be on the China coast—almost as far from Yunnan as is London; and that I had made a journey on foot across the width of China. Incidentally I had studied botany at Cambridge. But botany is not horticulture, and plant hunting is neither. That anyone should earn his bread and butter by looking for new plants is, I suppose, news to many people; it seems to strike them as curious, to judge by their remarks, and yet more by their scepticism. “What are you?” they ask me, curiously. “A plant collector!” “Yes, but what do you do?” in a tone of exasperation. “Why, collect plants,” I say brightly. The introduction of new foreign plants into England on a large scale is a comparatively modern development, and may be said to have begun with the Victorian naturalists. The outstanding figures perhaps were Sir Joseph Hooker and Robert Fortune. Charles Darwin of course introduced several notable plants, as did others. Douglas was a pioneer in North America; v...
