From “West of the Pacific: Fortune in China and Japan” in Pioneers in Gardening by Miles Hadfield:
“China, for botanists, was in almost every respect the opposite to North America. It was a densely populated land with an ancient civilisation. The arts, and the cultivation of plants in particular, had been practised for centuries. In the early part of the nineteenth century China was in a particularly bad state of internal confusion, and trading through those few ports used by the Western traders became almost impossible. An English army was sent to change the situation. As a result, in 1842 the Treaty of Nanking was concluded, which gave Britain increased powers of access to the mainland of China, defined British rights in the ports, and gained the island of Hong Kong.
“John Reeves now became the leading member of a committee formed… to engage a collector and despatch him to China…. Robert Fortune, the new superintendent of the hothouse department of the [Royal Horticultural] Society’s garden at Chiswick, was the man chosen….
“On 26th February, 1843, he sailed in the Emu on this pioneering journey to China, the fabulous land of Cathay.
“This is how he described his arrival:
“‘On the sixth of July, 1843, after a passage of four months from England, I had the first view of the shores of China; and although I had often heard of the bare and unproductive hills of this celebrated country, I certainly was not prepared to find them so barren as they really are. Viewed from the sea, they had everywhere a scorched appearance, with rocks of granite and red clay showing all over their surface: the trees are few, and stunted in their growth, being perfectly useless for anything but firewood. A kind of fir-tree (Pinus sinensis) seems to struggle hard for existence… but is merely a stunted bush… Was this, then, the ‘flowery land’, the land of camellias, azaleas and roses, of which I had heard so much in England?'”
From “Avernel” in The Collected Poems of William Alexander Percy by William Alexander Percy:
From Avernel the hills flow down
And leave it near the sky,
And it has birds and bells and trees
And fauns that never die.
When coral-pink azaleas fill
Its roomy woods with sweet,
And lilac spills of violets wait
For violet-veined swift feet;
When moths are budded by the oaks’
Uncrinkling rose and red
And high, high up, green butterflies
Reveal the poplars’ head;
When shaggy clouds in single bliss
Blaze up the sea-blue air,
Spilling their shadow-amethyst
Along the hills’ wide stair;
Then there is singing in the sun
And whispering in the shade
And dancing till the stars slope down
Their murmurous arcade…..
Hello!
The first six photos below show the section of Oakland Cemetery’s gardens where the rest of the photos were taken. It’s one of my favorite areas in the gardens for several reasons, not the least of which is the variety of plants and flowers that grow together there, to be discovered by simply aiming the camera in any direction. But it’s also one of the quietest and most peaceful sections. You descend into it via a curved roadway surrounded by large trees and shrubs, and your isolation from the sounds of the busy city outside — partially created by brick walls around the property — is as complete as you’d get from noise-cancelling headphones, the kind that still let you hear birds singing, bees buzzing, and the soft whoosh of the wind.
I had taken quite a few photos of azaleas from a different part of the property last year (see Azalea Blooms Aplenty), so for this series, I focused more on the roses than the azaleas. Rose varieties can be a challenge to identify, but these feature a very dark, saturated red petal color with yellow (or sometimes burgundy) stamens and anthers in the center, plenty of unopened late spring buds, and (you’ll have to imagine this part) an intense, heady scent that lets you know they’re roses even before you see that they’re roses.
Thanks for taking a look!
Glorious flora