Gardens: The original takeaway

THIS MONTH, ALL EYES ARE on China, as the drama of the Olympic Games is played out across Beijing. But whether we realise it or not, most of us already have a direct link to China via our gardens. Hydrangea, hollyhock, rhododendron, camellia, buddleja, forsythia, weigela and weeping willow are just a few typical garden plants found all over Scotland that actually have Chinese origins.

"There's such familiarity as they seem to have been around for so long," says David Paterson of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE). "I would not gamble my pension on it, but I think your average Scottish garden would have around 50 per cent of its plant material of Chinese origin. These species are really important to us."

To celebrate this connection, RBGE is hosting a number of events as part of the China Now festival which showcases ancient and modern links between the two countries. Events range from a walk looking at the Botanic Garden's own collection of Chinese plants to talks about modern-day plant hunters.

The relationship between RBGE and China dates back over 100 years and the living collections at the four RBGE gardens in Scotland include more than 1,600 species – the largest collection of Chinese plants outside the country itself.

It was in 1904 that George Forrest, a staff member at RBGE, set off on an expedition to China to collect hardy plants for British gardens. Six further expeditions resulted in the introduction of hundreds of plants, including species of rhododendron, primula, iris, gentian and clematis. Julia Corden, manager of the Explorers Garden in Pitlochry, which celebrates the work of plant pioneers such as Forrest, says their expeditions were invaluable. "The collectors were brave and possibly completely mad," she says. "They faced all sorts of dangers to bring these plants back."

Other important explorers included Robert Fortune, who visited China in 1843 and, despite being attacked by pirates on one occasion, managed to return with plants such as Jasmine officinale, many varieties of chrysanthemum, and tree peonies. George Sherriff visited the Himalayas in 1934, discovering new forms of primula and rhododendron. Corden has recently returned from a visit to the Himalayas in monsoon season, where she followed in Sherriff's footsteps and saw mountainsides covered with flowering rhododendron. "The weather was actually very similar to Pitlochry," she says.

The ability of Chinese plants to thrive in Scotland is something David Paterson of RBGE explains in further detail. He spends six months of the year working in Yunnan province and says that if you were to draw a line around the globe, you'd see that it is much further south than Scotland. But the reason that plants grow well here is because of elevation – while the Botanic Garden in Edinburgh is close to sea level, the mountain ranges of south-west China are between 3,000 and 5,000 metres above sea level. "You get a range of climate types that are not all that different from those in Scotland," says Paterson. "You'll find that the majority of plants introduced here over the last 100 years have come from that area and are ideally suited to either east coast or west coast gardening. In Yunnan province the rainfall is very similar to the Edinburgh average, but across the other side of the mountains, 100 miles away in Sichuan province, the rainfall is close to what you would find in Glasgow or Dunoon. So it's really easy to find plants that enjoy our Scottish conditions."

Although plant exploration remains as important today as it was in the past, it has a very different ethos. "The early collectors who were going out and collecting wild plants and bringing them back to the West worked in a completely different era – it was a different world," says Paterson. "I'm not saying what they did wasn't important – it was hugely important and almost as a by-product of their activity they got involved in conservation, because some of the plants they collected around the turn of the century are really difficult to find in China these days."

Conservation is now the driving force and there is new emphasis on collaboration and knowledge transfer between the two countries. RBGE signed a twinning agreement in 1991 with the Kunming Institute of Botany, which resulted in the establishment of Lijiang Alpine Botanic Garden and the Jade Dragon Field Station. The Jade Dragon mountain has an estimated 3,000 plant species growing on its slopes, but much of the habitat is endangered through developments such as over-harvesting of medicinal plants and natural threats including receding glaciers and major rock falls. Scientists from RBGE and KIB are working with the local communities to manage the land sustainably.

"China has become the place to be for business and for people to visit," says Paterson, "but the botanical players trying to get into China are a long way behind RBGE because we've been involved for so long. And we've moved away from just going into the country to collect plants to bring them home for our own research purposes and enjoyment and we've set up really sound collaboration ventures and initiatives. Although that's not to say that the Chinese plants we have in Scotland are any less important – they're a huge resource for our science, our conservation and also for our public education."

It's easy to see why Paterson is so enthusiastic about the plants of China. He explains that the country is home to somewhere between 30,000 and 34,000 species of flowering plants, compared to, say, 800 or so native species in Scotland. In fact, if you add together the native species of the UK, Europe and North America, only then would you find a similar level of biodiversity as that found in China. A visit to the Chinese Hillside at Edinburgh's Botanic Garden will reveal some of these plants, including Himalayan birch, magnolia, rhododendron, iris and primula, but if you really want to look at Chinese plants in close detail, your own garden might be just the place to start.

• For more information on China Now events at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and its associated gardens, visit www.chinanow-inscotland.org.uk or tel: [phone]. Find out more about the Explorers Garden in Pitlochry at www.pitlochry.org.uk/garden.php