Uploaded to YouTube by pnwlocalnews on Apr 21, 2010.
They call him Plant Hunter. Steve Hootman has been at the Rhododendron Species Foundation and Botanical Garden for 18 years. In those years, he has traveled all over the world, bringing back seeds from rhododendrons found only in the wild. And by wild, that means climbing mountains in Afghanistan, finding species on the side of the Himalayas, and traveling to Tibet.There are about 1,000 species of rhododendron in the world. Roughly 300 species grow in the tops of trees in tropical areas, Hootman said.