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A Botanical Pioneer in South West China.

© David Winstanley

With the Holiday season nearly here, may I draw your attention to this book?

If you do not know some one to buy you this; then snap it up as an early present for it is a delight to read.

From Handel-Mazzetti's foreword to the first edition:

It was in the eighteen eighties that the French missionary Delavay sent back to Europe the first collections of plants from Yunnan, one of the remotest and at that time least accessible provinces of China. Nearly half the species he collected proved new to science and it soon became clear that his work had opened up a unique floral region, richer perhaps than any area of comparable extent in the world. This profusion of species has several causes, among them the configuration of the land itself, of great interest to geographers as well as botanists; the deeply cut river valleys between the lofty mountain chains, which are a continuation of the Himalaya though bent round to the north and south; its location in the middle of an area in which so many large genera have evolved; and the direction of the mountain chains, which allowed plants to migrate to warmer climes during the ice ages and hence escape extinction. The great beauty of many of the plants and the similarity of the mountain climate to that of Central Europe roused the interest of gardeners and encouraged patrons of horticulture to send their collectors to carry on Delavay's work. The successes achieved by George Forrest were no doubt among the reasons that persuaded the Austro-Hungarian Dendrological Society at the end of 1913 to send their general secretary Camillo Schneider to Yunnan for a year with similar objectives. To broaden the scope of the expedition the Academy of Sciences in Vienna gave financial support to enable me to participate and, my return being prevented by the outbreak of war, continued to finance me for a further four and a half years. Three of these years were devoted to Yunnan and south-west Sichuan and the last two to Guizhou and Hunan.

Although I travelled as a botanist and was fully occupied by my own work, in this book I have tried to outline my observations in other branches of knowledge. The geological structure and unique characteristics of south west China cannot fail to make an impression on the traveller, more especially as a botanist with an interest in plant geography must pay some regard to geology and will regard cartographical surveying as a routine duty. However, I have confined myself to Nature and her works, among which may be counted primitive man and his activities.