December 8, 2015
I have just returned from a very successful three and a half week plant-hunting expedition to China. This was a trip designed to cover a great deal of territory in a short amount of time, all made possible by the increasing number of modern paved highways now being completed throughout the country. As I have done in my past several expeditions to China, this was organized to concentrate on some of the outlying regions where Rhododendron species are native, away from those regions where their diversity is highest and thus away from those regions that have been the most explored.
On this expedition I had five primary goals with the foremost being to locate and observe the virtually unknown Rhododendron shanii which is an outlying member of Subsection Taliensia that is known from only a few mountains in Anhui Province, far to the east of any of its presumed relatives in that large group. Secondary to this was to relocate the equally isolated and rare R. roxieoides which is also an outlying “remnant” member of Subsection Taliensia. My third goal, as I would be exploring the mountains of Anhui anyway, was to find the endemic R. anhweiense, presumably native to the very same mountains where I hoped to find R. shanii. This relatively familiar species had not been documented in the wild since it was first introduced almost 100 years ago. My final two challenges were to find R. fortunei ssp. fortunei and ssp. discolor, both of which are thought to be widespread throughout central and eastern China. Almost our entire collection of these two taxa at the RSBG consists of garden origin material and I was eager to compare these cultivated forms with the wild populations.
A full report and lots of great stories will follow but I can sum up the expedition as being very successful, both in terms of my primary goals (locating all five species other than roxieoides) but also in furthering our cumulative knowledge about this amazing genus and the plants they occur with. I will add that it was a particularly good “tree trip” with exciting genera like Cyclocarya, Staphylea, Daphniphyllum, Sycopsis, Pterostyrax, Sinojackia, Acer, Meliosma, Stewartia and Euptelea all making the list as it were.
Hootmanodendron
Steve Hootman
December 8, 2015