Nine Mountains
As it has been said before, a book is no more a collection of single words than a piece of music an accumulation of separate notes, and this too can be applied to travel for the purpose of looking at plants. Though the seeds and spores that return with me provide the adhesive of the experience entire, they are no more significant to the sum total than each moment that unfolds and each lesson downloaded.
Along with the unexpected closure of Heronswood in May, my raison primaire of months away observing plants in the wild was also shuttered. With a return to Vietnam to areas previously unexplored, or certainly underexplored already long in the tooth for this autumn, I found myself in a quandary. Realized from a simple inquiry, the board of the Elizabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden in Seattle Washington magnanimously provided financial and technical support for this expedition. Without their generosity or their commitment to the basic premise behind the Miller Botanical Garden- the responsible collection and introduction of plants into our gardens as a means to better horticulture, coupled with conservation and education- I would not be here. [Read more…]
It is from the intoxicated South Asian disorder of Kolkata in West Benghal, from which Rudyard Kipling once implied that if allowed time will bring you everything that a simple man needs, that I contemplate the the last six weeks in Sikkim. It is essentially the first moment during this time that I have had the opportunity to contemplate anything at all, being thunderstruck by the experiences of movement in and between the Eastern Himalaya.