In 2003, Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones and I spent several weeks together in the mountains of northern Vietnam, in the highland French redoubt of Sa Pa. It was late in the season, so we were hardly expecting météo parfaite but the weather was nothing short of comical; it was a gulag of fog and rain. Sa Pa and the surrounding mountains were bathed not so much in gray but the smoky aspirant used to dramatically portray fog in  B-Grade Frankenstein movies. We made fires in our rooms to hang our seed collections in order to achieve some degree of dryness. We actually heard wolves howling while walking to local restaurants at night. Cloris Leachman served as our waitress one evening. [Read more…]

Since leaving the botanical buffet of Shennongjia- indeed one of the most diverse floras our consortium has ever experienced, there had been, as expected, more time getting toasted with government officials than meaningful time in the field. Frustratingly, the weather- virtually unworkable during the most floristically opulent part of our trip- was now close to perfection. Our second to the last day of collection work had taken us up a mostly denuded mountain 2.5 hours from our hotel on roads under construction to a research facility devoted to medicinal plants. After lunch, we worked down slope along the remaining remnants of forest, and though some important collections were made (Rhododendron auriculatum, Lindera cheinii, Disporum cantoniense., et al), there remained no dubiety that our collective spirits were punctured. And though dramatic in silhouette against a scuttling sun, large thunderheads to the west heralded another change in the weather due in that evening.

Awakened the following morning at 5 am by someone’s attempt to repair the hotel’s hot water heater with a jackhammer (no, it was not a successful essay), and during considerable discussion over breakfast regarding possibly returning to Wuhan a day early, we ultimately donned our raingear and boarded our transport. [Read more…]

Precisely a year ago, most of the same participants on this trip to Hubei Province in the PRC were together in northern Vietnam; Ozzie Johnson, Scott McMahan, Andrew Bunting, and myself (this year we have been gratifyingly conjoined by Dr. Donglin Zhang from the University of Georgia, Athens, graduate student Ms. Tung and Professor Cheng from the Dept of Botany from the University of Wuhan). Twelve months prior, our ‘two day’ trek up and over a sheer mountain range known as Five Fingers had turned into 3.5 day death march. During that experience, the lot of us were not only pushed to our limits, but were adamantly committed to making sure that such a situation would never arise again. [Read more…]