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EAST MEETS WEST |
“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.”
The regal lily, Wilson’s best-known discovery, nearly cost him his life. He and his workers had collected several thousand bulbs and had just started back up the trail when they were caught in a landslide like the one whose remains we had just scampered up. A boulder hit Wilson, breaking his leg in two places. His men used a camera tripod to fashion a splint, loaded him into the sedan chair, and made their way to a missionary post near Chengdu. It was a rough three-day journey, and gangrene set in quickly. But Wilson so loved his active life that he could not bear the thought of amputation. Somehow he fought off the infection, but he was left with one leg shorter than the other and what he called his “Lily limp.” Then he resumed his journey, traveling ever farther into Sichuan.
Professor Yin shakes his head as he finishes recounting this tale. “Very brave,” he says in English. “Very brave.”
“I would have to say the same thing about Professor Yin,” says Chang, who always uses Yin’s title with his name or addresses him as Lao Tzu, which means “venerable master.” For four decades, Yin has hiked thousands of miles in search of plants. He has braved leeches, snakes, starvation, and altitude sickness, as well as the political turmoil of Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, to complete the daunting task Wilson and other foreign plant collectors began: a comprehensive taxonomy of Sichuan’s plants. Along the way, Yin became an expert in medicinal plants and trained many Tibetans as “barefoot doctors.” In the past decade, he has emerged as one of China’s leading conservationists and played a key role in establishing more than 20 protected wilderness areas.
“Yin is a man of the field,” says Simmons, who joined the Chinese ecologist on several expeditions in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “He got to all the key areas very early on, when it was still a hard trek, almost as hard as in Wilson’s day. And he’s done what Wilson did: He’s brought the flora of Sichuan once again to the attention of the world.”
These are things that Yin, who is quiet and self-effacing, would never say himself. But he does allow that he considers Wilson a kindred spirit. “I think he was very much like me,” he says, speaking through Chang. “He loved the plants and the people of Sichuan, and he wanted to share what he found. So when I’m walking where Wilson walked, I have a great sense of peace.”
The primary purpose of this journey with Yin was to follow parts of the Wilson Trail, where the young Englishman had traveled selecting the herbs, shrubs, and trees that transformed American and English gardens. But as we ventured ever farther into remote corners of Sichuan, it became increasingly clear that we were traveling the Yin Trail too.
Ecologists classify the Hengduan Mountains as a biodiversity hot spot—an unusual designation for any part of the temperate world. In general, temperate zones can’t compete with the tropics for numbers of plant species. That’s partly because of long, cold winters but also because the northern latitudes were heavily glaciated in the last ice age 10,000 years ago and lost much of their plant life. The Hengduans escaped this fate. Despite their high elevation (some peaks reach more than 20,000 feet), the mountains are far south enough to avoid being completely buried in snow and ice. Thus, while England’s native flora was largely scraped away by glaciers, in the Hengduans a variety of plants flourished—including angiosperms, such as the Magnoliaceae and Ranunculaceae, which originated in the Cretaceous Period. When the ice age ended, these ancient species and other, more recent ones were ready to take advantage of habitats that opened up in the mountains’ higher elevations—and the plants and trees speciated like mad. In the region there are, for instance, some nine genera and 50 species of conifers (Pinaceae), 230 species of rhododendrons, and more than 30 species of plants in the rose family. Today botanists list 3,500 species of native plants in the Hengduans—the highest number of endemic species for any temperate landscape.
WILSON’s Quarry
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Photographed at the Harvard University Herbaria. Special thanks to Emily Woods
