A symbol of International Women’s Day

Posted on by andy.winfield
With the delicate feathery foliage and flowers of Acacia dealbata on International Women’s Day

My name is Irene Cambi and I have the incredible honour of being Bristol Botanic Garden new trainee. I studied politics and human rights before becoming completely and totally amazed by plants. As a woman, and considering my interests in politics, today is a very important day to me.

Today, 8th of March 2019, is the International Women’s Day (IWD). This is a date that brings women (and men) together to fight for a more equal world and celebrate the political and social rights achieved. Although the United Nations began celebrating the IWD only in 1975, this day had been celebrated all around the world long before then. Indeed, the first National Women’s Day was observed in the United States, on the 28th of February 1909, to honour the 1908 female garment workers’ strike in New York.

In Italy, where I am from, it is tradition to donate on the 8th of March a flowering branch of Mimosa (Acacia dealbata) to every woman who is dear to you. I grew up receiving and donating myself this amazing scented, fluffy yellow flower on Women’s Day. Usually, this is a gift that men who are important in your life would give to you as a symbol of appreciation and respect. However, it is also exchanged between women as a symbol of solidarity and friendship.

But why this plant in particular?

Women fought against fascism in Italy during the Second World War.

History tells that the Mimosa was chosen by the Union of Italian Women (U.D.I) as a symbol of the women struggle for the 8th of March 1946. This was the first time that the Woman’s Day was celebrated in the country after the end of World War II. Mimosa flowers in February and March, filling with bright yellow colour most of the gardens of Rome, the South of Italy and the coasts of Liguria and Tuscany. These amazing landscapes inspired the three partisan women who proposed to adopt Mimosa as the symbol of the 8ht of March.

The Acacia dealbata was also elected plant of the women because of its delicacy in the appearance, which goes with the capacity to grow in the wild in difficult soils. Native to Australia, this is a typical pioneer species and it could be invasive in the natural environment. Mimosa was also the flower that partisans use to give to female couriers (Staffette), who risked their life in order to carry important information during the Italian resistance to the Nazi-fascism.

If you feel curious to meet this special plant, come to the garden to admire the feathery leaves and smell its amazing flower!! A happy Women’s Day to you all!

By Irene Cambi

 

 

 

Tea, thatch and early spring

Posted on by andy.winfield

Today as I write this the sun is shining, the birds are in full voice singing, cawing and screeching around the Garden. Bulbs are popping up, crocus are the first with daffodils a week away from carpeting the ground with yellow. Primroses are dotting grassy areas and bees are beginning to forage in the middle of the day; the minimum temperature that a bee can fly is said to be 13 degrees, so when you see one out and about you know the season is changing. In February in this part of the UK we get an extra two and a half minutes of light every day; after February and through March to June it is only two minutes. This is why a lot seems to change in February in the Garden, it is a conduit for spring; the end of January is incomparable to the beginning of March in terms of light, flower and the beginnings of warmth. We’ll still get ice, cold, wet and maybe even snow again between now and summer, but days like this make us feel that winter is nearly behind us.

Crocus appearing in the Garden.

In the Garden there are exciting changes happening. Our South African display has had the framework of a traditional African roundhouse present for much of last year; as I write this it is being thatched with a South African reed called Cape thatching reed; Thamnochortus insignis, the building will then be rendered in a red cob. These features are important for bringing context to the plants around it, being a talking point and attracting people to the Garden where they can leave with maybe a lot, maybe a little, but some new knowledge of the plant world that they didn’t have before.

Lu Yu.

Another development is our Chinese tea plantation. Yes, a tea plantation here in Bristol, just a small one but a tea plantation none the less. When landscaping the area where we’ll grow tea, visitors ask what I’m doing and seem intrigued and interested with the response. Tea is something that is in the heart of UK people, many conversations, moments of relaxation, tears and laughter have happened over a cup of tea and many millions of hands have been warmed on a mug during winter. In China tea drinking dates back 5000 years. Legend has it that Emporer Shen Nung was boiling water when leaves from a wild tree blew into his pot; he was so interested in the aroma that he drank some. He named the brew ch’a, meaning to check or investigate. Tea became integral to the culture of China when Lu Yu, a Chinese scholar, dedicated his life to the study of tea; he wrote a treatise called ‘ The Classic of Tea’ in 760CE, the earliest work dedicated to tea. Today every Chinese household will have tea brewing sets and use tea brewing as a form of welcome, celebration, in family gatherings or to apologise. We’re looking forward to planting our fifteen (so far) Camelia sinensis plants; they should be in the ground by March, which, coincidentally, is when our refreshments open again after the winter…

We look forward to seeing you in the Garden, keep your eyes on the ground and enjoy early spring!

Winter wildlife in the darkest days

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I’ve just been turning the compost heap, it’s pretty much the darkest day of the year. I’ve been joined by three bickering robins and a scurrying blackbird. Compost heap turning is a feast for them with all the bugs and worms who themselves are eating the soft plant material in the heap. The Garden is full of wildlife and at this time of year as the bees and butterflies disappear and many birds migrate, we notice the residents that stay around.
Friendly robin
Robins are associated with this time of year, their singing snaps through the air; we like to think they’re singing for us, our best friends. Of course, they’re only after us for our debris, the worms in our soil spoil. Robins adapted to a life in woodlands where wild boar rambled around in groups snuffling up the soil; these days gardeners are the boars, helpfully turning over the ground to reveal the treats.
Badgers also co-exist with us in the Garden, they overturn pots and grub up the soil, dig under fences and make little toilets. Despite this we like them, they eat slugs which has to be a big bonus! To live with them we leave out pots full of soil for them to rummage through; when we chop down a grass such as miscanthus we’ll leave the dry foliage outside their set, in the morning we’ll see that its been dragged down inside for cosy bedding. Many gardeners find them an annoyance, but they are part of the landscapes we create and we have to let them live their lives as freely as possible; nature is about balance and these large mammals are and important part of that.
Grumpy squirrel
Many grey squirrels live in the trees of the Garden, popping down to tear off fleece or carry food up to their nest. They’re much maligned and are a pest, but I can’t bring myself to hate them; someone once described them to me as elderly red squirrels, crotchety forgetful senior citizens. I once saw one climbing the side of a tree in some urgency with a whole croissant in its mouth; with an angry backward look it obviously didn’t see the funny side.
A crow’s lone caw is evocative of the time of year. One of the cleverest inhabitants of the Garden, they have been known to use tools in some countries; sticks to get out of reach food and car tyres to crack nuts in the road. They’re protective of the Garden and will hassle a passing buzzard or heron that hits the air space; crows are our bouncers.
Clever crow
At this time of year we can see the sun come up and down, the latter causing consternation among the blackbird population in the Garden. Isolated warning songs can be heard around dusk; I imagine them charging around shouting ‘don’t panic’ as they panic. They bustle along the ground from shrub to shrub thinking they haven’t been seen, before belting out one of the best songs of the bird world.
The gardening year starts slowly before gathering momentum quickly through spring and into the full helter-skelter of summer when there seems so much life buzzing and scurrying around. On the shortest day nature’s numbers are depleted but there is still much to see. The Garden itself has winter scented flower, bright berries and evergreen gloss. As the light level is at its lowest point on the shortest day, I see that as the end of one gardening year, the day after is the beginning of the next.
From everyone at the Botanic Garden, have a fun a relaxing winter break, you deserve it!
By Andy Winfield

Winter is coming.

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One of the showstoppers of the Peony display

This weekend we begin our winter opening hours; this means the Garden will be closed at weekends until the beginning of February 2019. We’ll still be open during week days but on a Saturday and Sunday the gates will be closed. This is a reflective time for us as the plants shut down with the Garden and we look back through the summer when the now leafless trees were all life and energy.

Springtime this year
I’ll remember the summer of 2018 as having more long hot dry spells than Bristol is used to; the ground was parched and the pool water had evaporated by around two feet. Of course, Bristol being Bristol the water doesn’t hold off for long and the sky has been making up for lost time this week pouring from the clouds like a waterfall. The earlier dry weather brought in the crowds to our summer exhibition, The Impossible Garden, and more butterflies than we’ve seen here before. There is a team of volunteers monitoring our fluttery visitors every day of the week, and this year was a bonanza including a rare small blue butterfly which excited us all.

One of my personal highlights was finishing our Peony display on the edge of the Chinese Herb Garden. Peony gardens are special places in Chinese culture, places of contemplation where people sit, write poetry and attach it to the seat. We thought this might be a good thing to encourage here so…


This is the Peony Garden,
A place of peace and time,
In Chinese life they’d sit right here,
And write a little rhyme.
So if you feel creative,
Write down on a sheet,
The way it is you feel right now,
And pin it to this seat.

…perhaps needs a bit of work?
The peonies put on a wonderful display in May and will become a standout feature of the Garden in late Spring. In fact I think that Spring this year was the best I’ve seen it in the Garden, and it was all down to the Beast from the East! Plants had begun to do their thing when a blast of cold dry weather halted them in their tracks, for nearly a month. As a result, when it finally did warm up, everything flowered together; magnolias erythronium, wood anemones, tulips, primroses before bluebells arrived, surprised at why everything else was still up.
Luke Jerram
It has been a good year in the Garden despite the extremes; many visitors will have come to see The Impossible Garden by Luke Jerram and the Bristol Vision Institute, a great addition this year. The exhibition brought a new perspective and showed us how the same Garden can achieve a new atmosphere through art; the feedback we had was that visitors who came for the exhibits left also learning about plants. Music to our ears.
So into winter and planning for next year, finishing all the landscaping jobs we were too busy to do in the summer; the plants are all wrapped up for any eastern blasts that may come our way and we’re looking forward to the winter jewels that brighten the darkest days of a winter border.

By Andy Winfield


Winter flowering honeysuckle; its sharp lemon scent will waft around the dark winter garden.

Plant blindness

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You may or may not of heard of the term ‘plant blindness’; it’s a phrase that we in the Botanic Garden have been hearing much more of in recent years and will continue to throw around in the future. It refers to the slow shutting off of plant knowledge from generation to generation resulting in an inability to acknowledge plants around us. The simple things that were once common knowledge, such as dock leaves used for nettle stings are becoming bred out of a collective instinct and plants are becoming irrelevant and annoying green things to many people.
I can remember when my eyes were truly opened. I noticed trees that I hadn’t before; as I walked along the street I started looking at the borders and the hanging foliage all around me. Before, I’m not sure what I looked out for in the streets, the pavement or the shops, who knows, but plants for sure changed my life and I see them changing the lives around me at the Botanic Garden. I think I could live to be three hundred and still find something in the plant world that fascinated me. This week I learnt about the incredible relationships between some species of orchid and ants. The ants don’t pollinate the orchid flower but hang around the plant living off an ‘extrafloral’ nectar secreted elsewhere; they then do everything to protect their food source and keep the plant safe. Plants and animals have these delicate relationships that allow both to flourish, and it’s fair to say that ours has become less delicate over the years.
Dandelion seed head
This change in the collective instinct of people has come about through successive generations becoming more urbanised with less plant interaction such as blowing a dandelion seed head, throwing a grass seed dart, eating wild blackberries or sticking cleavers to jumpers; children still do this but there are many who don’t and lose a connection with the plant world. The result of this is that education reduces the amount of plant learning, and in biology courses there is a main focus on the animal kingdom; there is a perceived lack of interest in the plant world. Things have become so bad that the Oxford Junior Dictionary removed words like ‘acorn’ and ‘buttercup’ preferring instead ‘broadband’ and ‘cut and paste’; they were seen as no longer relevant to a child’s life.
University of Bristol Botanic Garden
There is however, a great appetite among young people to be green, to recycle and mend the excesses of the generations that went before them; often students tell me it’s the biggest issue for them and they’d like to make a difference. How is a difference made? I think we can all make a simple difference by introducing plants to friends and relatives, opening eyes to the trees and weeds and the force of life going on around us and under our feet. It could be argued that many of the world’s problems can be solved with plants; forests, food, habitats are all areas that need experts, and while there are many graduates of zoology degrees there are few from plant sciences. This is changing with Universities now offering full plant science degrees; there are many jobs in plant sciences as governments and companies are beginning to see how important it is. Bristol University is launching a plant science degree starting in September 2019 based in the magnificent Life Sciences building with a group of world experts in the field of plant science. Of course, undergraduates will use the Botanic Garden as a second home and have access to all our knowledge and experience, we’re really looking forward to it. If you, a relative, son or daughter are interested click here to view the degree.
We all have a role to play in protecting our relationship with the natural world which can be played by simply talking about the plants we see to people. I’m always disposed to optimism and today’s

young people seem to be committed to green ways; this problem arose through successive generations and perhaps it can be cured in the same way, the passing down of knowledge as we go.

By Andy Winfield

At your convenience.

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The Garden is changing year on year, saplings are becoming trees and borders now fill out showing maturity. One of the changes is visitor numbers to the Garden which have risen steadily, and as a result our facilities were becoming inadequate, such as the loos.

What is a forward thinking 21st Century Botanic Garden to do when the they need new toilets? We were in no doubt that we had to think of an alternative that is safe and sustainable. 
Toilets are all about waste, drinking water is used to flush them and research suggests that the average person uses 45 litres of water each day just from flushing a toilet; if we could find a way of restricting this we could save thousands of litres in the Garden.

So, with the help of the University’s Sustainability Department, the toilet we went for is French in design but wouldn’t look out of place in a Scandinavian woodland with its lodgey feel; they arrived in kit form, think of the biggest IKEA self build and you get the picture. It is not so much a compost toilet but a desiccating device; a sealed tank is sunk into the ground with a chimney raised from the back, this chimney faces south and has a turbine on the top which draws in warm air, removing smells and evaporating moisture. In time this is said to remove pathogens and leave next to nothing in the tank. These facilities are becoming more common now with the National Trust and many golf courses, allotments and even canal barges turning to them.

So far the public have taken to them, they look unusual and the idea of helping the environment has struck a chord, there is genuine interest and humour; they never used to be able to joke about something like this but now they have a lot to go on…

By Andy Winfield

The Impossible Garden

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We’ve always felt that art and the Garden work well together. Every Easter we run a sculpture exhibition which brings this home, plants and art are good friends; nature’s sculpture makes the Garden a gallery and placing human art amongst it embellishes both. With this in mind, for some time we’ve wanted to show a permanent summer exhibition but nothing has fit the bill.
Luke Jerram on one of his exhibits.

Step in Luke Jerram this year. If art and plants are good friends, so are Luke and Bristol; he has created a perfect replica of the moonwhich is floating at various locations around the world at the moment; he created a giant water slide down one of Bristol’s busiest shopping streets for one day in 2014, a day that brought the city together, everyone was smiling; he also positioned pianos around the city for anyone to play, I’d love walking home from work to hear music drifting along the street. As you can see Luke is very much a force for good in the city, and unknown to us was regularly visiting the Garden with his family. So, when he contacted us to ask if it was ok to display The Impossible Garden here we took five seconds before nodding vigorously, yes please!

The exhibition sits well in the Garden and is the outcome of a residency at the Bristol Vision Institute (BVI); Luke is colour-blind and wanted to explore the processes and limitations of vision. With the help of Bristol University BVI researchers and the Bristol Eye Hospital he spent time with visually impaired children to help him understand. The result is a series of exhibits that are fun yet also thought provoking, making you question how you perceive objects, colours, reflections and patterns.

One thing that highlights the diversity of exhibits is that every member of the Botanic team has a different favourite showing that we all observe things in a different way from each other.
I think this is one of the best events we’ve had here at the Botanic Garden; it’s a real pleasure to see visitors ‘getting’ the exhibition, from youngsters to their grandparents. Everyone sits on the oversized picnic bench, peeps into the infinite pool, tries the door to nowhere and sits on the glitchy park bench.
It looks like Luke has nailed another one.
The exhibition runs throughout the summer and the Garden is open for seven days a week from 10 until 4:30; see you here!

Andy Winfield

Going to Extremes

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For Bristol, this is extreme weather; usually we hardly go a week without rain, it’s been over a month. The plants in the Garden are taking it all in different ways; the aromatic Mediterranean plants look at home and are producing wonderful fragrant oils whose scents drift up as you brush past them.  Tree ferns on the other hand need their trunks watered daily to stop them from drying out; native to wet forests they have adapted roots on their trunks to soak up all the rain.
The Fynbos of South Africa
All plants need are sun, air, water and food and with these four essentials they can grow anywhere. Some of these places are more extreme than we ever experience here in the West Country, in South Africa for example. Plants of the Cape mountains are known as Fynbos, and many of these are dependant on fire for their survival. Fire clears the land and brings nutrients to dormant seeds that lay under shrubs and spurs some bulbs into flowering; just a few weeks after a bush fire regeneration begins. Similarly, in California the coastal redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, has fire retardant bark which protects and allows it to live through a thousand years of extremes.
Desert bloom.
Extreme desert conditions are home to many species of plants from spiky armoured cacti to the amazing lithops or living stone. This plant camouflages itself by resembling a stone, preserving its water and becoming invisible to browsers. Also, desert annuals release their seeds which sit on the baking surface for a year until the small window of rain that arrives. The rain brings rapid growth, the plants putting all energy into producing flower and seed; this is known as a desert bloom.
Rainforests plants have large waxy leaves with adaptations for water runoff, such as ‘drip tips’ or
Spongy fire retardant bark of the
coastal redwood

holes through the leaves (see swiss cheese plant) to allow the heavy rain to drip down to the roots below. Other plants live on trees with roots hanging in the air to soak up water and leaf debris. Large trees produce buttress roots for extra stability as they are relatively shallow rooted, and each tree houses many other plants.

In the Arctic only a thin layer of soil above the permafrost exists which freezes and thaws through the season, so plants have a shallow root system and are able to photosynthesise in bitterly cold conditions; some can continue growing under a layer of snow. Many take advantages of the short polar summer and long days of sunlight by flowering and setting seed during this time. In all there are around 1,700 plants growing in the Arctic.

A Botanic Garden houses plants from all over the world which have adapted to the conditions of their own habitats, we do all we can to make them feel at home but sometimes the weather steps in. So whatever the weather throws at us, there is always a plant somewhere in the Garden that is very much at home.

 Andy Winfield

Let’s hear it for the Volunteers

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This week the Botanic Garden volunteers were awarded the highest accolade for volunteering in the land, the Queen’s Award for Volunteer Services; aka the MBE for volunteer groups. As a member of staff here I’m very chuffed for them because I know that without them the Garden would be a very different place.
It could be argued that one of the most precious commodities we have these days is time, and so the value attached to people offering us their time for an afternoon, morning or just a couple of hours each week is unquantifiable. The Garden has four full time Gardeners, including a job-share; one trainee; just under two administrator positions shared by three people; and, of course, the Curator. The number of volunteers on our books is two hundred and forty-four! The volunteers are guides, gardeners, stewards, leaflet deliverers, office administrators, newsletter editors, front gate welcomers, exam invigilators, marketing supremos and car parking attendants. They come to us from all walks of life and ages thrown together through a love of plants. When we have a tea break its great to see the combinations of personalities excitedly talking about a plant they’ve seen or a garden they’ve visited; a Bristol University student talking with an eighty-year-old pensioner about succulents; a brawny tree surgeon discussing mycorrhiza with an arty American. It’s a very positive environment to work in, and I’m not sure I would have stayed in the job for this long without them. The Garden exists because of them, the staff would be drowned under the weight of work without them.
They say that to truly appreciate something you should imagine living without it, and the Botanic

Garden without volunteers would be a greyer place. The tea breaks would have less chatter and smiles, the Garden would be unfinished and unkempt, there would be no refreshments, welcome lodge or guided groups; no home baked cakes brought into the mess room, no newsletter and probably no Friends group. The idea of it is unimaginable.

So, this award is hard earned and well deserved by everyone that has ever pulled a weed, poured a cup of tea or pushed a leaflet through the door of a snappy dog for the Botanic Garden.
Congratulations from all of the team, we’re inspired by you!

Andy Winfield

Looking East

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2018 marks the seventeenth year of the partnership between Bristol and the city of Guangzhou (formerly Canton) in Guangdong Province Southern China. Located on the Pearl River about 120km north west of Hong Kong and 145 km North of Macau, Guangzhou has a history spanning 2200 years and was a major terminus for the maritime silk road and continues to serve as a major port and transportation hub today as well as being one of China’s largest cities. In 2016 a stainless-steel kapok flower sculpture that was donated by the Mayor of Guangzhou to the City of Bristol and now stands proudly in our Chinese Medicinal Herb Garden. Many people and business have links with Guangzhou and the University of Bristol has made a number of links with organisations across the city including the San Yet-sen University. On a visit in January 2017 to Guangzhou our Dean of Science Professor Tim Gallagher visited the South China Botanic Garden to make contact with scientists in the Chinese Academy of Science. An action from this meeting was for the South China Botanic Garden and the University of Bristol Botanic Garden to work more closely together. With this raison d’être in mind myself and Tony Harrison our Traditional Chinese Herb Garden co-ordinator and former Vice President of the Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine set off for China on the 11 April 2018. This was my first visit and Tony’s sixth to this vast country. We would only visit Guangzhou city with one day trip organised to the Yingde Mountains to meet tea growers and see first-hand the Yingde Karst stone landscape and visit its quarries.
Our trips had a series of key objectives:
  • ·         To make a link between University of Bristol Botanic Garden and the South China Botanic Garden
  • ·         Source new lotus Nelumbo nucifera cultivars to replace ones we have lost from our collection
  • ·         Understand tea cultivation, observe tea being cultivated in the Yingde tea growing mountains, meet the growers and secure tea cultivars from central and northern provinces where the tea is more cold-tolerant
  • ·         Obtain different species of turmeric and other members of the ginger family to add to our collection
  • ·         Look at their medicinal herb collection and identify species that may be for merit to our
    Myself and Tony with South
    China Academy of Sciences 

    collection in Bristol

  • ·         To visit classical gardens of Guangdong including Qinghui Yu Jin Shan Fang and Liang Yuan gardens as models for our culture gardens at the University of Bristol, Botanic Garden
  • ·         Exchange ideas with colleagues at the South China Botanic Garden

Guangzhou is not a city for the unseasoned traveller as the bustling busy streets teem with people and traffic and its rapid growth over the past twenty years has swallowed up its old centre, known around the world by its former name of Canton. Located in Guangdong Province, one of Chinese powerhouse provinces, the city is home to 13 million people. Most of these have migrated here from the countryside over the past twenty years in search of work, higher paid jobs and a less arduous working life than the agricultural villages of the rural Guangdong.

Everywhere tower blocks 30-40 stories high have sprouted up to accommodate the rising population. Early fast growth has morphed into more substantial buildings of glass and steel where offices now bustle with activity processing the wealth the province generates from its many factories that make many goods we enjoy in the West. The local inhabitants do not have any green space of their own as private gardens and allotments are not know. But large areas of often hilly ground set in what is otherwise a flat delta landscape surrounding the Pearl River are covered in indigenous forest. Many have temples, and most are accessible by a network of pathways and facilities that allow the population to us them for recreational sports, jogging, walking, reading and generally getting away from the noise of the traffic.

We based ourselves in the Baiyun district next to one of these green spaces Baiyun Mountain. This made an excellent rest bite and proved to be near to the South China Botanic Garden and the Chinese Academy of Science. Here we made contact with their senior scientific team, headed up by Professor Ying Wang a plant scientist and geneticist. As part of our discussions we gave a presentation on the development of the UBBG and how the garden is used for teaching by the School of Biological Sciences and our public engagement work. We met senior science staff including: Professor Xia Nianhe, chief taxonomist and national expert in Bamboos, Gingers and Magnolias, who has worked at the garden for 36 years and has been instrumental in developing a unique collection of Magnoliaceae in a 10-hectare (25 acre) part of the Botanic Garden, including the newly discovered Magnolia guangdongensis with its attractive copper coloured hairy undersides to its leaves, discovered on one mountain top in Guangdong Province. He has also developed a unique collection of ginger family Zingiberaceae, including species of ginger Zingiber, tumeric, Curcuma,Cardamon, (Elletaria & Amomum) and Galangal Kaempferia. This comprehensive collection is in a specially designed garden 1.2ha in size, (the whole of the University of Bristol Botanic Garden is only 1.7 ha).
Tony Harrison with colleagues from the
South China Botanic Garden
looking at the ginger collection.
Associate Professor Lei Chen responsible for the aquatic plant collection, including over 100 cultivars of lotus, Nelumbo nucifera, Professor Xiaoyi Wei who researches natural product chemistry and Professor Ziyin Yang whose work into tea cultivation and phyto-chemistry is of national importance to China. Our hosts gave presentations of their work, which ranged from finding new plant chemicals to DNA finger printing wild population of rare Chinese Herbs and establishing ex-situ populations to develop agricultural business and so remove pressure on dwindling wild populations. 
Professor Ziyin Yang was particularly interesting as his work on tea chemistry has lead him to study many different tea cultivars (in China there are many hundreds of tea cultivars). Soil type and position on mountain site and genetic composition all affect the chemical composition of the tea cultivar as the base ingredient of the tea making process. The chemical process that changes in the tea leaves during processing gives rise to the final polyphenol mix, giving that tea its individual character of aroma and taste.  Later in the trip we travelled courtesy of tea buyer and exporter Jennifer Jiang to the Yingde mountain area. A two-hour drive north of Guangzhou we finally reach the home of the famous Yingde tea.
The climate is sub-topical and when we visited in the second week of April the wet season was starting. Everywhere thick mountain forest vegetation was bursting into life. This heavily mountainous region rises from flat river flood plains of sediments and rich soils. This is home of Yingde tea which is famous throughout China. Many cultivars are grown, but we meet a tea grower who grows a hybrid between a big leaved Ynnuan cultivar and a narassas cultivar known as ‘Large Leaved No.9’. 

The tea character is Oolong and the most profitable cultivar is intriguingly called 1959, a blend developed and named in honour of our Queen Elizabeth’s state visit to China in that year. This high-profile blend which is sold in China commands a high price of £80 per kilo retail and £40 per kilo wholesale. After a couple of hours of tea tasting and discussion of processing we travelled to the plantation.

Discussing tea cultivation.
The trend in China is for more tea growers to grow in a sustainable way. Pesticide use in common in China a practice that became mainstream about fifteen years ago in a drive to increase food production. The result has been a short-term increase in food production, but at cost to the environment and a reliance on pesticide use that stays with the crops into the food chain. Pesticide residue in foodstuffs, including tea is proving a big problem as levels that do not meet European standards result in high quality tea not being able to be sold to the lucrative European market. In a move to change this some growers including the one we visited have moved towards sustainable tea growing.
A number of practices to help achieve this:
i)                    Cows are introduced to the tea plantation (they eat weeds, but not the tea as its tastes bitter). This keeps down the weeds. Some weeds are unpalatable and at the time of our visit a non-native species of Oxalis and a Persicaria with strong growth were being dug by hand with the aid of a mattock. Back breaking work, but necessary to avoid the use of weed killer.
ii)                   Extra nutrients are provided by collecting cow dung and rotting it down in large steaming heaps. This is a quick process in the sub-tropical climate, (temperatures on the day of our visit were 26’C, but this will rise to 36’C in summer with lots of rainfall and annual rainfall of 1700mm). After rotting down under a tarpaulin, the manure is placed in a tank for further rotting and the resulting liquid is syphoned off into another tank to be diluted down with water before being pumped onto the plantation by a series of sprinklers. The resulting nutrient spray increase growth by up to 50%. 

iii)                 Trees are allowed to grow at higher density and a mixture of tree species are cultivated to attract different bird species. These trees provide safe roosting place and refuge whilst they make feeding sorties in amongst the tea plants.
iv)                 We saw tea five years old and new plants that were only in the soil for one month. The oldest plants were 50 years old and picking of the tea shoots was carried out once a year. 50% less than an intensive plantation where it’s done twice a year. The result is the plants are less stressed. 
Cows are an important part of weed
control in a sustainable tea plantation
 One hours drive northwest of the tea plantation was the limestone karst region of Yindge, home to the famous Yingde stone. Yingde stone (limestone with calcite deposits) is famous throughout China for its water worn limestone full of character, particularly holes dissolved by acid rain over thousands of years. We visited Yingde Stone Garden built by the local tourist company where the most astonishingly beautiful pieces of stone are displayed in a large garden setting. The sizes of some the pieces dwarf visitors and resemble the individual stone sizes at Stonehenge or Avebury Circle, but with the difference of many pieces full of delicate holes. The obvious question of how these are quarried and transported without damaging each piece remained to us unanswered.
Everything in China is huge. The South China Botanic Garden is a whopping 333 ha (3.33 square
Yingde stone piece

kilometres) that’s 822 acres or just over twice the size of Clifton and Durdham Downs combined and even has its own Metro station.  The Garden is flat with numerous lakes and pools. Its centre piece is a large glasshouse with climate-controlled zones, featuring tropical, subtropical and even a cool temperate region which is refrigerated. The standard of care and display of these collections was excellent. The South China Academy of Sciences located in the South China Botanic Garden and is one of a number of centres of excellence for research and technology. The Garden boasts 600 staff including 120 academics and its main focus is the flora of the South of China and the neighbouring countries of Loas, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. Documenting and describing the 36,000 species of plant found in China has been a strategic focus over the past 40 years. A number of floras have been published and now an e-flora is available to all at here.  After discussion we plan to have a memorandum of understanding between our two gardens and look forward to working with and share plant material as part of the ‘partner or sister city link between Bristol and Guangzhou’.

by Botanic Garden Curator Nick Wray