Cultivating interest

Tourists view Chinese roses in Beijing Botanical Garden

Plant collectors are back in China after a long hiatus thanks to the reform and opening-up policy to seek natural treasures for gardens, medicine cabinets and dinner tables. Mike Peters reports.

On my first visit to the Beijing Botanical Garden several years ago, the last thing I expected was a flashback to the American TV sitcom Gilligan's Island. But coming out just as I entered was Mrs Thurston Howell III to the life, in an immense lavender garden hat and matching parasol.

"I am so disappointed!" she told a similarly hatted lady in tow.

"They just have all the same plants we have at home!"

The Lovie Howell lookalike was right to an extent. But this is hardly a case of China copying the West.

Garden flowers such as magnolias proliferate in US and European gardens because Western scientists have spent the past several centuries eagerly collecting plants in the Eastern Hemisphere, especially in the Middle Kingdom.

"China has more plants than there are anywhere else in the temperate world," says Peter Raven, the longtime director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and lead author of the encyclopedic Flora of China.

"In fact, it has almost twice as many plants as the United States, which is about the same size, and about three times as many as there are in Europe."