![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lblanchardMimpish Monday has come early this week on account of I hit save instead of just letting LJ autosave my draft until tomorrow)
[This is an occasional series of postings inspired by Abigail Rorer, Mimpish Squinnies: Reginald Farrer's Short Guide to Worthless Plants. Rorer's book includes prints of fourteen plants Farrer considered worthless-- an interesting hybrid of botanically accurate and...different. You can see her work, including all fourteen mimpish squinnies, here: http://www.theloneoakpress.com/prints/newer.html ]
Had he lived, Reginald Farrer would no doubt have written a travel book or books as engaging as On the Eaves of the World and The Rainbow Bridge about his two-year expedition to Burma. But he did not live, dying on October 17, 1920 at the age of 40 after a short illness. However, he did leave behind a series of dispatches to The Gardeners' Chronicle, which were published from June 1919 to some time after his death. The publication received a large packet of dispatches that Farrer prepared for mailing before his death, and which they doled out through 1921 and 1922.
Farrer was accompanied, for the first year, but the young E. H. M. Cox, who published an account, Farrer's Last Journey, in 1926. Much of it was cobbled together from these dispatches as well as from letters Farrer sent back to Cox and other correspondents. Cox, alas, is not the storyteller Farrer was.
The Gardeners' Chronicle isn't the easiest thing to read in pdf (if you don't believe me, check the first page here). And the OCR is a hopeless muddle, so I am transcribing them as time permits. Here's the first -- more botany and less drama in these, but they're still glorious.
Mr. Reginald Farrer’s Second Exploration in Asia,
No. I. --The Burma-Chinese Alps. No. 1695.—Saturday, June 21, 1919
On the Road.
Once more I am off on track for the hills. But in an unknown land among unknown peoples and conditions, and with no Purdom and no Mafu to show me the ropes and protect my ignorance. However, let us hope good will come of it; and now for the start. This time, though, my whereabout is not hard to tell: but few maps will give its details, and in some of its parts there are no people at all to supply local names, even if I could spell them if they did, or you pronounce them. One other caution, too: undeterred by cold-blooded criticism, I intend to continue describing my plants as I myself see them. Nothing more surprises and pains me, indeed, than to have some plant-portrait of mine alluded to as being “in somewhat enthusiastic terms” when, to my own eyes, the colours have only erred in their rigid, frigid accuracy. At the same time I have discovered that a species in cultivation does not always bear the same brilliancy of hue as it affects in the wild hills; so that those who have read my impressions of it as it was, may fairly think they have occasion to blaspheme when they see it as it is, in their gardens, a pallid weed. A sad case in point is my purple Salvia F. 169. No one who sees its shrunken anaemic blooms in a border could easily help thinking me untruthful for describing its imperial purple glory in the Tibetan hayfields. Yet so it was. Therefore I must here enter a preliminary warning against being too certain that a plant in exile will necessarily be as beautiful as the same plant at home. But it will be the plants at home that I shall be describing; and only, and exactly as they are at home.
Myitkina is the rail-head and jumping-off place from Upper Burma into the Alps that border on China, a region sparsely and wildly inhabited, and only very recently taken over by Great Britain, in an easy sway that leaves the country pretty well alone, content so long as China does not try to occupy it. Myitkina itself is still tropical – a pleasant settlement, lying along beneath the embankment of the placid Irrawaddy. But cool breezes descend on it from the not far-distant snows, with the result that it gives an impression of a great, homely, green park, with squatting bungalows embowered in verdure and gay with familiar garden-flowers. Never, for instance, have I seen Hollyhocks so brilliant in flower, so neat and refined in habit. But across the Irrawaddy the trail finds itself at once in the wild jungle where tigers prowl; and for a week or so pursues its course through the heavy opulence of that uncharted tangle. At first the bigger trees are curtained with Petrea volubilis, now gone out of bloom, but with the velvety plum-colour of its innumerable developed calyces, producing as beautiful an effect as when they are lavender-blue, and contrast so finely with the violet-velvet of its flower-stars. (My names must, in nearly all cases, of course be taken as merely tentative).
In due course the Nmai Hka is reached, the great eastern branch of the Irrawaddy, that comes down from the mountains bordering on Tibet. For some days the road continues up and down, and in and out above it through the jungle, circumnavigating the countless spurs and ravines that descend to the river; and occasionally, on lofty suspension-bridges, crossing the tributary torrents that now, at the end of March, still sleep quietly in the depths of their profound gorges, but in the rains of June awake to ravening furies. Though still chiefly tropical, with various Palms and an unbelievable abundance of Banana, the jungle now has a few familiar things. Buddleia asiatica is the most welcome, Lonicera. Hildebrandtii drapes tall trees with masses of giant Honeysuckle-heads, not a bit more brilliant than its meek diminutive at home; and an Actinidia with little orange trumpets falls in curtains, with bunches of leaf-bracts so vividly white that at first sight one thinks one has come on some snowy multiflora Rose. But the great beauty of these parts is the Bauhinia just now. This forms a graceful tree, so unanimously flowered that on the high slopes of the jungle it stands out like a blooming Cherry-tree on some mountain-side in a Chinese picture. It occupies, too, a very rigidly defined zone, between two and three thousand feet. From such an altitude I dare not hope it will prove hardy, but it shall go badly with me but it must have its chance, for it is a most lovely thing, intensely fragrant like a hyacinth-scented Cattleya, and not unlike a reversed Cattleya, too, in its great flowers (see fig. 151) of tenderest pale shell-pink, with a crimson flame on their upper segment. In the river shingles Rosa bracteata is now opening among the boulders; and all the Scottish-looking lengths of dark granite bluffs and reefs and islets that make the huge Nmai Hka so like a magnified version of some Scotch stream are now aflare with the furious scarlet of Rododendron indicum, smeared like an interminable bloodstain, just above high-water mark, all along either bank of the river.
But at last the road, long since dwindled to a mule-track, turns away from the Nmai Hka, eastward, and sets itself to mounting a high pass or two, before sinking again into the bed of the Ngaw Chang, a notable tributary of the Nmai Hka, drawing its waters from the Border Alps, now so close that one can see some of their lower ranges dimly through the haze of the many jungle-fires that are clearing strips of hill-flank for planting. But the passes, though ascending to 7,500 ft., are still in the tropics, though deep and dense now, with the heavy rainfall. Huge-fronted Palms without trunks lurk in the darkest chines, whose steepness is such that their trees have to develop bare boles of gigantic stature; and on tall, stately trunks Tree-ferns expand their sumptuous fronds. By the mossy alpine looking pathside, emerging clots of pink Begonia-blossoms mimic early Hellebores coming up, and the rich blue Gloxinia-blooms of Gesnera make a telling contrast; while on one stretch of the ascent occurred a remarkable Campanulad of graceful arching habit, like a Solomon’s Seal, swinging from each axil-meeting a single fruit, large as a round Black Hamburgh Grape, of porcelain-like surface, and rich blue-violet colour. But, though we were now well up in the alpine levels, and above the bare austere magnificence of Mont Cenis, no one could have found a sign of this, in the profound green stillness of that primeval tropic forest, with Magnolias making a carpet of their creamy petals.
Nor were there as yet even any Rhododendrons, until we turned a corner, and there came into a view a tall tree with a gaunt, bare bole like a Scotch Fir, but of brilliant lacquered-looking red, carrying a domed crown of solid soft pink*. As this trunk, a foot through and some fifty feet high, offered no foothold, it was necessary to shoot down blossoms of this, our first Rhododendron (for to the gardener, R. indicum is always Azalea), since one never dares pass by a first specimen, for fear of its also being the last. This Rhododendron, however, proves general at about 7,500ft. in the range even ascending to Hpimaw, so that I have fair hopes that it may be hardy, though of course its extreme precocity of blossom may spoil its usefulness in England, unless it can be taught to adopt lazier habits. These blossoms (see Fig. 150) though carried in their best abundance on a naked-trunked tree, are true “Azaleas” in style, rather than Rhododendrons – of a very pale pink, darkening slightly to the edge with a yellowish flush in the throat, and the darker rose of the tube showing through, thus suggesting a deep “eye” to the flower, which is larger and of the most ravishing fragrance. Small wonder if we had, then, but scant attention for another Rhododendron that was also there – a true Rhododendron, though out of flower, that may very likely turn out to be R. Kyawi. And of other flowering trees in this high forest there were also a beautiful Cherry of bright pink, and a pure white Syrax that scented the air. The Cherry occurred occasionally, and the Syrax more often as we drew near the big mountains. But both of these were trees of such height and nudity that again the shot-gun was our only resource. The echoes clattered, the birds scattered, and a few petals or a torn shoot were all that came fluttering slowly down in the quiet air. Reginald Farrer
*Rh. Sp. F., 801.
[This is an occasional series of postings inspired by Abigail Rorer, Mimpish Squinnies: Reginald Farrer's Short Guide to Worthless Plants. Rorer's book includes prints of fourteen plants Farrer considered worthless-- an interesting hybrid of botanically accurate and...different. You can see her work, including all fourteen mimpish squinnies, here: http://www.theloneoakpress.com/prints/newer.html ]
Had he lived, Reginald Farrer would no doubt have written a travel book or books as engaging as On the Eaves of the World and The Rainbow Bridge about his two-year expedition to Burma. But he did not live, dying on October 17, 1920 at the age of 40 after a short illness. However, he did leave behind a series of dispatches to The Gardeners' Chronicle, which were published from June 1919 to some time after his death. The publication received a large packet of dispatches that Farrer prepared for mailing before his death, and which they doled out through 1921 and 1922.
Farrer was accompanied, for the first year, but the young E. H. M. Cox, who published an account, Farrer's Last Journey, in 1926. Much of it was cobbled together from these dispatches as well as from letters Farrer sent back to Cox and other correspondents. Cox, alas, is not the storyteller Farrer was.
The Gardeners' Chronicle isn't the easiest thing to read in pdf (if you don't believe me, check the first page here). And the OCR is a hopeless muddle, so I am transcribing them as time permits. Here's the first -- more botany and less drama in these, but they're still glorious.
Mr. Reginald Farrer’s Second Exploration in Asia,
No. I. --The Burma-Chinese Alps. No. 1695.—Saturday, June 21, 1919
On the Road.
Once more I am off on track for the hills. But in an unknown land among unknown peoples and conditions, and with no Purdom and no Mafu to show me the ropes and protect my ignorance. However, let us hope good will come of it; and now for the start. This time, though, my whereabout is not hard to tell: but few maps will give its details, and in some of its parts there are no people at all to supply local names, even if I could spell them if they did, or you pronounce them. One other caution, too: undeterred by cold-blooded criticism, I intend to continue describing my plants as I myself see them. Nothing more surprises and pains me, indeed, than to have some plant-portrait of mine alluded to as being “in somewhat enthusiastic terms” when, to my own eyes, the colours have only erred in their rigid, frigid accuracy. At the same time I have discovered that a species in cultivation does not always bear the same brilliancy of hue as it affects in the wild hills; so that those who have read my impressions of it as it was, may fairly think they have occasion to blaspheme when they see it as it is, in their gardens, a pallid weed. A sad case in point is my purple Salvia F. 169. No one who sees its shrunken anaemic blooms in a border could easily help thinking me untruthful for describing its imperial purple glory in the Tibetan hayfields. Yet so it was. Therefore I must here enter a preliminary warning against being too certain that a plant in exile will necessarily be as beautiful as the same plant at home. But it will be the plants at home that I shall be describing; and only, and exactly as they are at home.
Myitkina is the rail-head and jumping-off place from Upper Burma into the Alps that border on China, a region sparsely and wildly inhabited, and only very recently taken over by Great Britain, in an easy sway that leaves the country pretty well alone, content so long as China does not try to occupy it. Myitkina itself is still tropical – a pleasant settlement, lying along beneath the embankment of the placid Irrawaddy. But cool breezes descend on it from the not far-distant snows, with the result that it gives an impression of a great, homely, green park, with squatting bungalows embowered in verdure and gay with familiar garden-flowers. Never, for instance, have I seen Hollyhocks so brilliant in flower, so neat and refined in habit. But across the Irrawaddy the trail finds itself at once in the wild jungle where tigers prowl; and for a week or so pursues its course through the heavy opulence of that uncharted tangle. At first the bigger trees are curtained with Petrea volubilis, now gone out of bloom, but with the velvety plum-colour of its innumerable developed calyces, producing as beautiful an effect as when they are lavender-blue, and contrast so finely with the violet-velvet of its flower-stars. (My names must, in nearly all cases, of course be taken as merely tentative).
In due course the Nmai Hka is reached, the great eastern branch of the Irrawaddy, that comes down from the mountains bordering on Tibet. For some days the road continues up and down, and in and out above it through the jungle, circumnavigating the countless spurs and ravines that descend to the river; and occasionally, on lofty suspension-bridges, crossing the tributary torrents that now, at the end of March, still sleep quietly in the depths of their profound gorges, but in the rains of June awake to ravening furies. Though still chiefly tropical, with various Palms and an unbelievable abundance of Banana, the jungle now has a few familiar things. Buddleia asiatica is the most welcome, Lonicera. Hildebrandtii drapes tall trees with masses of giant Honeysuckle-heads, not a bit more brilliant than its meek diminutive at home; and an Actinidia with little orange trumpets falls in curtains, with bunches of leaf-bracts so vividly white that at first sight one thinks one has come on some snowy multiflora Rose. But the great beauty of these parts is the Bauhinia just now. This forms a graceful tree, so unanimously flowered that on the high slopes of the jungle it stands out like a blooming Cherry-tree on some mountain-side in a Chinese picture. It occupies, too, a very rigidly defined zone, between two and three thousand feet. From such an altitude I dare not hope it will prove hardy, but it shall go badly with me but it must have its chance, for it is a most lovely thing, intensely fragrant like a hyacinth-scented Cattleya, and not unlike a reversed Cattleya, too, in its great flowers (see fig. 151) of tenderest pale shell-pink, with a crimson flame on their upper segment. In the river shingles Rosa bracteata is now opening among the boulders; and all the Scottish-looking lengths of dark granite bluffs and reefs and islets that make the huge Nmai Hka so like a magnified version of some Scotch stream are now aflare with the furious scarlet of Rododendron indicum, smeared like an interminable bloodstain, just above high-water mark, all along either bank of the river.
But at last the road, long since dwindled to a mule-track, turns away from the Nmai Hka, eastward, and sets itself to mounting a high pass or two, before sinking again into the bed of the Ngaw Chang, a notable tributary of the Nmai Hka, drawing its waters from the Border Alps, now so close that one can see some of their lower ranges dimly through the haze of the many jungle-fires that are clearing strips of hill-flank for planting. But the passes, though ascending to 7,500 ft., are still in the tropics, though deep and dense now, with the heavy rainfall. Huge-fronted Palms without trunks lurk in the darkest chines, whose steepness is such that their trees have to develop bare boles of gigantic stature; and on tall, stately trunks Tree-ferns expand their sumptuous fronds. By the mossy alpine looking pathside, emerging clots of pink Begonia-blossoms mimic early Hellebores coming up, and the rich blue Gloxinia-blooms of Gesnera make a telling contrast; while on one stretch of the ascent occurred a remarkable Campanulad of graceful arching habit, like a Solomon’s Seal, swinging from each axil-meeting a single fruit, large as a round Black Hamburgh Grape, of porcelain-like surface, and rich blue-violet colour. But, though we were now well up in the alpine levels, and above the bare austere magnificence of Mont Cenis, no one could have found a sign of this, in the profound green stillness of that primeval tropic forest, with Magnolias making a carpet of their creamy petals.
Nor were there as yet even any Rhododendrons, until we turned a corner, and there came into a view a tall tree with a gaunt, bare bole like a Scotch Fir, but of brilliant lacquered-looking red, carrying a domed crown of solid soft pink*. As this trunk, a foot through and some fifty feet high, offered no foothold, it was necessary to shoot down blossoms of this, our first Rhododendron (for to the gardener, R. indicum is always Azalea), since one never dares pass by a first specimen, for fear of its also being the last. This Rhododendron, however, proves general at about 7,500ft. in the range even ascending to Hpimaw, so that I have fair hopes that it may be hardy, though of course its extreme precocity of blossom may spoil its usefulness in England, unless it can be taught to adopt lazier habits. These blossoms (see Fig. 150) though carried in their best abundance on a naked-trunked tree, are true “Azaleas” in style, rather than Rhododendrons – of a very pale pink, darkening slightly to the edge with a yellowish flush in the throat, and the darker rose of the tube showing through, thus suggesting a deep “eye” to the flower, which is larger and of the most ravishing fragrance. Small wonder if we had, then, but scant attention for another Rhododendron that was also there – a true Rhododendron, though out of flower, that may very likely turn out to be R. Kyawi. And of other flowering trees in this high forest there were also a beautiful Cherry of bright pink, and a pure white Syrax that scented the air. The Cherry occurred occasionally, and the Syrax more often as we drew near the big mountains. But both of these were trees of such height and nudity that again the shot-gun was our only resource. The echoes clattered, the birds scattered, and a few petals or a torn shoot were all that came fluttering slowly down in the quiet air. Reginald Farrer
*Rh. Sp. F., 801.
