Chapter 49 Also talk about flowers and plants

I bought another English book about China. The author is Sheila Pym, and it is the biography of Augustin Henry called Woods and Trees. Love the title of this book.I like the setting sun, low hedges, and forests on the cover.Although I don't know botany, I am very interested in flowers and trees.Looking through Zhou Shou's articles on azaleas, flowers and plants, I also feel comfortable. That night, I hurried through the first volume. It was 1881, and the Northern Irishman started working in a customs office in China.later.He began to collect plants, and for several years, he successively sent specimen seeds of Chinese wild flowers back to several important botanical research institutions in the UK.

A list is listed in the appendix of the book, explaining that Henry collected 8,161 kinds of flowers in Hubei and Sichuan, 839 kinds in Hainan Island, 4,800 kinds in Yunnan, and 4,800 kinds in other places. Ninety species are collected in remote mountains and fields, and 2,090 species are collected in Taiwan.There are fifteen thousand nine hundred and eighty kinds in total. Of course, all those sent to the UK were dried specimens. Of course, before him, several European botanists also transported many kinds of Chinese flowers and plants to Europe; they stayed on the ship for four or five months, some of them died, and many of them survived.That was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries AD.

Even earlier, some Chinese flowers had passed through Persia and spread to the West through the Silk Road. It is said that Fellini, a Roman orator in the first century, had already mentioned Chinese day lilies. It is said that there were peach and apricot trees in China long ago in ancient Greece. I also heard, Marco Polo said, that there is a kind of rose in China that is as big as a cabbage; it must be a peony. At the end of the eighteenth century, the British Botanic Garden decided to collect a large number of Chinese flowers and transplant them to the UK.But at that time, China did not welcome foreigners to wander around, and they could only collect flowers from the Guangdong East India Company.

The book "Woods and Trees" does not mention much about the history of the spread of Chinese plants to the west.The author almost used Henry's letters during his lifetime to compose the skeleton of this biography, but it is a pity that she has no uniqueness in handling such materials.She doesn't know much about China, so it's inevitable that her writing will be dull. But, to me, none of this matters. For me, the happiest thing is to think of Henry's joy of collecting flowers everywhere.It's like "when the mountains are in the spring, the nose is full of fresh green fragrance, visiting the ten miles of peach blossoms in the pit of the drum tower, walking alone with a stick, walking with the flow, the spring is especially leisurely".

In the middle of the night, I found Zhou Shoujuan's "Flowers, Flowers, Plants and Grass", and accidentally found him quoting two poems by Yu Guobao of the Song Dynasty: Returning to live up to the eyes of the Westward Journey, I once knew that there were no flowers in the world. Henry left China on the last day of the last month of the last year of the nineteenth century, and was feeling ill when he boarded the ship.Will he have the feeling in the poem?