When I look at them I always think how their ancestors came from the Min River Valley, a place I visited in the year 2000 when with my husband and my two daughters (aged 19 and 22), we travelled in South West China. Much to the surprise of some of the people we met in various backpacker hostels 'I've never seen a family travelling together.' We saw some wonderful and amazing things and endured some hideous discomforts, too.
Towards the end of the time, we went on a Chinese tour from Chengdu in Szechuan to Jiuzhaigou, one of the most beautiful places in the world. The route took us up this steep-sided valley into Tibetan Szechuan, and up to Songpan, nowadays a pony-trekking centre as well as the most important town in the area - the thing I remember best at Songpan was, though, the wonderful meat and vegetable pasties we bought from local women in the market-place, and on the return trip, when our guide, whose job it was to make us visit as many tourist-trap retail outlets as possible, hadn't thought about giving us lunch, we forced her to stop in Songpan.
This was good news for the local women, who had quite a few pasties they hadn't yet managed to shift, and good news for our Chinese fellow-travellers, who were just as ravenous as us, but too well-mannered to impose on the tour guide. I can still remember the expression of frustrated rage on the latter lady's face.
Anyway, the valley in which Songpan is located is very beautiful, and very Tibetan, as the photograph shows. Sometimes uncomfortably so; I remember local labourers shaking their fists at the Chinese tour minibus. But most people were very friendly, and lovely to meet.
I was thrilled to see plants that grow in gardens here growing wild there, like the clematis tangutica sprawling with its yellow Chinese-lantern flowers by the road side, like Traveller's Joy does here.
At Jiuzhaigou I saw (among others) several species of roses, recognisable by their leaves, and was delighted to see a paeony, not in flower, but growing there, wild.
What I didn't realise then was that the Lilium Regale, one of my favourite flowers - I had them in my wedding bouquet - came from a hillside above Songpan. We didn't see any, though.
They were collected by a young man called Ernest Wilson (the same name as my late father-in-law and my brother-in-law, but not from Northern Ireland.) If you ever go to Chipping Campden, there is a memorial garden to him there, planted with many of the many plants he collected. He saw the Lilium Regale on his third trip to China.
'In the Min Valley' he wrote 'the charming Lilium Regale luxuriates in rocky crevices, sun-baked throughout the greater part of the year…' He writes of 'the city of Sungpan, nestling in a narrow smiling valley, surrounded on all sides by fields of golden grain, with the infant Min, a clear, limpid stream, winding its way through in a series of graceful curves. In the fields the harvesters were busy, men, women and children, mostly tribesfok, in quaint costume, all pictures of rude health, laughing and singing at their work.' And he describes the Lilium Regale; 'Not in twos and threes, but in hundreds, in thousands, aye, in tense of thousands.' The lilies grew in among coarse grasses and scrub - meadow-flowers, which is an interesting thought. Maybe I should try naturalising them in my pocket-hankie meadow?
Wilson, of course, reduced the numbers of the lilies rather a lot, by collecting over 6,000 bulbs - and I do wonder how many are left now. Plant-hunting was an Imperialist project - conservation wasn't an issue for the men who did that work. But Wilson paid a price for his coup. He was caught in a landslip and his leg was broken in two places.
He was taken back, in a sedan chair, to Chengdu, and nursed by the Quaker missionaries there. Davidson, who set his leg, wasn't actually a qualified doctor, if I remember rightly - anyway, Wilson felt he did a superb job.
Other plants in my garden that Wilson collected include: clematis armandii, rosa moyesii, viburnum davidii and clematis montana rubens. But not, apparently, clematis tangutica, though he does list them in his A Naturalist in Western China.
On a different note: when I was doing medieval German literature as part of my course at Durham, we were told about the hermits whose knowledge of and consumption of roots showed their wisdom. Of course many rooted vegetables have poisonous relatives. But I - not at all hazardously - collected some baby carrots and our first new potatoes for dinner yesterday. I do love the feel of those pale egg-like tubers in my hand, and a bunch of newly-pulled carrots is a delight to the eye before it becomes a gastronomic delight.
One which is pretty rare to come by nowadays. You can get bunches of carrots in supermarkets and also, of course, in farmer's markets, but they can't match the flavour of something that comes almost straight from the earth to the pot. Oh, the feel of those waxy new potatoes against my tongue, and the scent of new carrots… and the sweetness of spring cabbage, which you only get with fresh-picked..
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