A Brief History of Plant Hunters

How the precarious adventures of botanists have shaped gardening as we know it today. 

Plant hunters were adventurers, often charting new territories and plant species alike. 
Illustration by Dave Hopkins

The Compendium of Gardening Innovations (Laurence King Publishing, 2018) by Abigail Willis explores the history of gardening and the ingenious discoveries that shaped it into the productive past-time, passion, and livelihood that it is today. Willis is a qualified gardener through the Royal Horticulture Society in the UK. She writes for the London Evening Standard, the Daily Telegraph, and has authored another book called The London Garden Book A-Z. The illustrations are by Dave Hopkins whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Economist and Mojo. The following excerpt discusses the explorations of plant hunters.


For an occupation usually regarded as sedate, gardening has a surprisingly swashbuckling hinterland. Gardeners have long lusted over exotic plants, and for centuries plant hunters have traveled the globe, braving all kinds of dangers, to procure new specimens – sometimes, as in the case of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s 1804 – 6 expedition across America for Thomas Jefferson, quite literally charting new territory as they botanized.


Lewis and Clark at least made it home (having discovered such garden-worthy treasures as Philadelphus lewisii and Clarkia pulchella). The story of plant hunting is otherwise littered with corpses, catastrophes, and pitfalls of the most literal kind.

Robert Fortune’s exploits on behalf of the Royal Horticultural Society included fighting pirates, smuggling tea plants out of China, contracting malaria and dangling over a boar pit. David Douglas (he of the fir) was not so ‘Fortunate’; having botanized successfully across America, he met an untimely end in 1834, aged just 35, at the bottom of a wild bullock trap in Hawaii. French missionary and botanist Père Jean-Marie Delavay was felled by bubonic plague in the plant-rich territory of Yunnan in 1895, but not before bequeathing the blue poppy Meconopsis betonicifolia to Western gardeners. Modern-day planters do not have it much easier: in 2000 Tom Hart Dyke spent nine months in captivity, having been kidnapped while searching for orchids in the Panamanian jungle. Douglas and Delavay may not have made old bones, but their names, like those of other plant collectors, live on in plants such as Quercus douglasii and Paeonia delavayi.

The earliest recorded plant-hunting expedition was instigated by the pharaoh Hatshepsut in 1500 BC and successfully relocated a number of frankincense trees from the African Land of Punt to the queen’s funerary garden. Relief carvings show how the highly prized specimens were transported, root ball and all, to their new home in Egypt.

Later plant-hunting sponsors included not just royals and statesmen but also churchmen like Bishop Compton (whose garden at Fulham Palace was the first in Britain to contain a Magnolia virginiana, retrieved from Virginia for him by the missionary Reverend Banister), nurseries such as Veitch, and scientific institutions including the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and Kew Gardens in London. Kew’s first official plant hunter was Francis Masson, whose expedition to South Africa in the 1770s introduced over 40 species of Pelargonium. The Encephalartos altensteinii cycad brought back by Masson to Kew in 1775 flourishes still: the world’s oldest pot plant.

Swedish plant hunter Carl Peter Thunberg spent three years in South Africa learning Dutch in order to botanize in Japan in 1775 as part of the Dutch East India Company (the only organization at the time allowed access to the archipelago). His dedication paid off: in the Cape Thunberg was the first Westerner to describe the red tea bush (Aspalathus linearis), while in Japan his many discoveries included that stalwart provider of autumnal color, Acer palmatum.

Empire builders or champions of biodiversity (the choice is yours), plant hunters have changed the way our gardens look, from the towering monkey puzzle trees beloved of the Victorians (the first specimens of which came to Britain in 1795 via Archibald Menzies, who retrieved the seeds having been served the cones for dinner in Chile) to the early twentieth-century craze for rock gardening inspired by Reginald Farrer’s single-minded quest for alpine plants mountains near and far.

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