Text 1: Seeds from the edge, by Priya Oldroyd

An original contemporary interview.

Dr Ruth Wishart does not look like an adventurer. She is small, softly spoken and wears reading glasses on a cord around her neck. But for twenty years she has spent every autumn in the mountains of south-west China, collecting seeds for a botanic garden, and her stories would not be out of place in a thriller.

‘People imagine botany is gentle,’ she tells me, laughing. ‘Kneeling on a lawn with a magnifying glass. My last trip involved two landslides, a fever and a night on a ledge.’

The landslides were the worst. ‘You hear a sort of crack, and then a rumble, and the whole hillside above the track starts moving. We ran. A boulder the size of a car went over the road thirty metres behind our mules. Afterwards nobody could stop talking, which is what fear does to you.’

Why take such risks for seeds? She becomes serious. ‘Because some of these plants grow in one valley and nowhere else on earth. A new road, a dam, a few hot summers, and they are gone. If we grow them in gardens, and share the seed with partner gardens here and in Europe, they have a future even if the valley does not.’

Her greatest moment came at four thousand metres, in sleet, after a six-hour climb. She had been searching for three seasons for a dwarf rhododendron with flowers the colour of plums, last recorded by botanists a century ago. ‘It was growing out of a crack in a rock, perfectly ordinary, perfectly calm, as if it had been waiting for me. I laughed out loud, and then I had to sit down in the sleet, because at that altitude you cannot laugh and stand up at the same time.’

She collected a few hundred seeds, carefully, from different plants, leaving most behind. ‘You never take everything,’ she says. ‘That would make you a thief, not a collector.’

Text 2: A letter from the mountains, by William Dunmore

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1893, a plant collector working in western China writes to the owner of the nursery that employs him.

Dear Mr Halloway,

I write from a village whose name I cannot spell, having at last returned from the high valley, and I have news both good and bad.

The bad first. On the 3rd, as we crossed a pass, the path gave way beneath our second mule, and the poor beast fell some hundreds of feet into the gorge, together with the two boxes containing all the bulbs I had gathered since June. I watched them go and could do nothing. I will not pretend to you that I did not sit down upon the path and curse the mountains, the mule and myself in equal measure.

Since then I have had a fever, which kept me a week in a herdsman’s hut, and on another occasion was obliged to hand over my watch and most of my silver to a party of armed men who met us on the road, and who, I must in fairness say, were perfectly civil about it.

And now the good. Ten days ago, on a rocky slope below the summer snowline, I found the lily. It was growing in hundreds among the rocks, white trumpets streaked with purple on the outside and the colour of cream within, and the scent of it filled the air so that I smelled it before I saw it. I believe it to be entirely unknown in Europe. I have dug two hundred bulbs, which are packed in clay and moss and will go down the river by the next boat.

I know that you have expressed some impatience at the cost of this expedition. I would ask you to wait until you see these lilies flower in your glasshouses before you judge it. When every lady in England wants one, I think you will find I have earned my wages, and the mule his.

Both of these texts are about collecting plants in dangerous mountain country.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the dangers and rewards of their work
• how the writers present these dangers and rewards to readers

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