As many of you may know I live with a botanist, who regularly drags me out to see some rare specimen of the British flora or other. I have at various times been completely underwhelmed by the Cotswold Pennycress (Thlaspi perfoliatum) and the Tunbridge Filmy Fern (Hymenophyllum tunbrigense). They may be really rare and endangered (almost under lock and key) but they don’t exactly make an impact on the eye if you’re a gardener. The truth is Britain does not have spectacular or wide-ranging flora: it contains only 2,000 or so species, about 8,000 fewer than Europe. Our paucity is due to regularly occurring periods of species-reducing glaciation that effectively kill almost everything. It seems unfair our country, whose climate allows us to grow so much, provides us with so little of our own of true garden value. Even plants once thought native, like the common snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis) have now been proved to be introduced about two thousand years ago. This may help explain why Britain and Ireland have produced so many famous plant-hunters and herbarium collectors who’ve traipsed through America, Europe, South Africa and Asia. Some areas, such as South Africa’s Cape, are very rich in flora and I would hate to imagine my garden without a crocosmia, agapanthus or kniphofias, three of the my favorite genera from The Cape. The richest country of all is China, boasting 3,1000 species. Sichuan, in the south-west of China, is extremely blessed and the name is short for four circuits of rivers and gorges. These steep gorges are home to peonies, rhododendrons, buddleja and magnolias to name but a few. Many of these were introduced into Britain by Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson in the early years of the 20th century. However Wilson was able to locate many of these because Augustine Henry (1857–1930), an Irish-born customs officer working in central and western China, had described them and logged their positions. Henry’s official brief was to collect information about medicinal plants, but he was interested in flora full stop and collected 158,000 specimens for Kew. He was encouraged by Joseph Hooker (1817–1911) who was compiling a new flora of China. I will probably never get the opportunity to trek through those tree-lined gorges myself, although I long to see them before they are destroyed by man. Luckily I will be able to experience them vicariously at the Exeter Hall, in Kidlington, just outside Oxford on March 13 when Seamus O’Brien, curator of Kilmacurragh Arboretum, Co. Wicklow will talk — for the princely sum of £3. O'Brien travelled in Augustine Henry’s footsteps and wrote a superb book In the Footsteps of Augustine Henry, published in 2011 by Garden Art Press (£40). O’Brien’s first trip to Hubei in 2002 had a special poignancy. A new dam was about to flood one of the gorges, so he did some last-minute collecting for the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Glasnevin in Dublin and Kilmacurragh. Four weeks later the water had started to cover the lower slopes, obliterating the lower lying flora. It seems plant hunting can be just as important now as it was in Henry’s day.