A Complete Guide to the Native Flora That Transformed the Gardens of the World
Consider what the temperate garden would look like without China. Remove the roses bred from Rosa chinensis. Take away the rhododendrons, the magnolias, the wisterias, the clematis, the peonies, the chrysanthemums, the hostas. Eliminate the camellias, the forsythias, the buddleias, the hydrangeas. Strip out the lilies — regale, auratum, speciosum, lancifolium — that came from the valleys and mountain slopes of Sichuan, Yunnan and Hubei. What remains is a garden of such reduced scope and colour that it is barely recognisable as the thing we know.
China is the source — directly or through its influence on breeding programmes — of more ornamental garden plants than any other country on earth. This is not merely a function of China’s size, though its geographical extent, from tropical Yunnan to the sub-arctic mountains of Manchuria, encompassing every temperate climate zone on the planet, does generate extraordinary botanical diversity. It is also a function of the particular geological and climatic history of East Asia, which, unlike Europe, was not scraped clean by the advancing ice sheets of the last glaciation. While the European flora was impoverished by the ice, retreating south through mountain ranges aligned east-west that blocked the plants’ path of escape, the Chinese flora survived in refugia and then re-colonised, producing a diversity of genera that European botanists, encountering it for the first time in the nineteenth century, found almost impossibly rich.
This guide addresses the flowers of China — cultivated and wild, ancient in garden use and recently introduced — as both a horticultural resource and a living connection to one of the world’s great plant civilisations.
The Making of a Botanical Garden: China and the West
The story of how Chinese flowers reached Western gardens is inseparable from the story of European imperialism and the complex, not always admirable, history of botanical collection in Asia. The plant hunters who brought China’s flora to Europe and America — men like Ernest Henry Wilson, George Forrest, Frank Kingdon-Ward, Reginald Farrer and Joseph Rock — were mostly employed by commercial nurseries or botanical institutions with commercial interests, and they operated in China at a time when the country was experiencing profound political instability and the sustained humiliation of unequal treaties and colonial encroachment. The plants they collected were, in a sense, taken — though the taking was generally welcomed by local communities who benefited from the employment and trade that the plant hunters brought.
The greatest of these collectors, by almost any measure, was Ernest Henry Wilson, who made four collecting expeditions to China between 1899 and 1911, primarily for the Veitch nurseries and then for the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. He introduced more than one thousand plant species to Western cultivation, including Lilium regale, Meconopsis punicea, Rosa moyesii, Hydrangea aspera subsp. sargentiana, and dozens of other plants that are now entirely naturalised in the consciousness of the Western garden. His near-fatal injury in a Sichuan rock fall — which left him permanently lame and was sustained while transporting bulbs of L. regale to safety — has already been mentioned in this series; it stands as the most dramatic physical testimony to the cost at which Chinese plants reached European gardens.
George Forrest, employed by the Edinburgh-based nurseryman Arthur Kilpin Bulley (whose commercial venture eventually became Bees Seeds), made seven expeditions to Yunnan between 1904 and his death in the field in 1932, introducing the genus Primula in its extraordinary Chinese diversity to Western cultivation, together with hundreds of rhododendron species, gentians, meconopsis and countless others. Forrest narrowly escaped massacre in 1905 when his party was attacked during the Tibetan lama uprising — he was the sole European survivor — and returned to Yunnan five more times. His dedication to collecting was absolute and, ultimately, fatal: he died of a heart attack while collecting in the Yunnan wilderness.
These are not comfortable stories. But understanding them is part of understanding the Chinese garden plant — as something with a history of arrival, and a context of origin, that the RHS label in the garden centre does not convey.
China’s Own Garden Tradition
Before addressing individual plants, it is important to acknowledge that China has its own garden tradition of great antiquity and sophistication, quite distinct from — and in many ways more philosophically developed than — the Western ornamental garden tradition that absorbed its flora.
The Chinese garden, particularly in its classical form as exemplified by the surviving gardens of Suzhou, is not primarily a place of botanical display. It is a philosophical and artistic construction, designed to compress within a limited space the essential qualities of landscape — mountains, water, vegetation, sky — and to create through their arrangement an environment for contemplation, poetry, painting and the refinement of perception. The garden is understood in classical Chinese aesthetics as a form of art continuous with landscape painting and calligraphy: a three-dimensional composition in which rocks, water, plants and architecture are arranged to produce a series of framed views that reveal themselves progressively as the visitor moves through the space.
Within this tradition, specific flowers carry specific cultural meanings that are ancient and precise. The Four Gentlemen of Chinese culture — plum blossom (Prunus mume), orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum — represent the four seasons and the virtues of the scholarly gentleman: resilience in adversity, refinement and delicacy, integrity and flexibility, and perseverance through hardship. These associations, developed over more than a thousand years of Chinese poetry, painting and philosophy, are encoded in the flowers themselves as surely as the RHS Award of Garden Merit is encoded in the label on a nursery plant.
The tree peony — Paeonia suffruticosa — was for centuries the flower of the imperial court, its cultivation restricted by law, its possession a mark of the highest rank. The chrysanthemum, cultivated in China for at least three thousand years, is the flower of autumn and of longevity. The lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) is the Buddhist flower of enlightenment, rising from mud to produce its pure flower above the water’s surface. The plum blossom flowers in the snow of late winter, demonstrating the virtue of perseverance. Each of these associations is a living inheritance of a garden culture that predates the Western ornamental garden by many centuries.
The Major Groups
Tree Peonies (Paeonia suffruticosa, P. rockii and their hybrids)
The tree peony is China’s national flower — or shares that distinction with the plum blossom, depending on which period of Chinese cultural history one consults — and its cultivation in China predates its arrival in the West by at least a thousand years. The centre of tree peony cultivation is the city of Luoyang in Henan Province, where an annual tree peony festival draws visitors in their millions in April, and where some of the oldest cultivated specimens are centuries old. Named varieties number in the hundreds in the Chinese tradition, each with its own poetic name and precise description of flower colour and form.
The species most commonly cultivated in Western gardens is Paeonia suffruticosa, a deciduous shrub reaching 1.5 to 2 metres in time, producing enormous flowers — sometimes exceeding 25cm across — in white, pink, crimson, purple and yellow in late April and May. Its cultivation requirements are specific: a sheltered position away from the worst winds and late frosts, deep fertile soil with excellent drainage, and patience — tree peonies are slow to establish and may produce few flowers in their first two or three years in the garden, before building to a mature flowering display of extraordinary impact.
Paeonia rockii — named for the American botanist and explorer Joseph Rock, who collected it in Gansu in the 1920s — is perhaps the most beautiful of all peonies in any form. Its white flowers have a large, blotched marking of deep maroon-purple at the base of each petal — the so-called ‘flare’ — that gives the blooms a quality of dramatic contrast unique in the genus. In the wild, P. rockii grows on rocky limestone cliffs in Gansu and Shaanxi at altitudes that give it exceptional cold-hardiness. Named Rock’s peony hybrids, derived from cultivated forms of this species, are available in a range from white to deep purple and have the flare marking in varying degrees of intensity. They are among the most garden-worthy of all flowering shrubs for a temperate climate.
The yellow tree peony — Paeonia lutea and its relative P. delavayi var. lutea, introduced from Yunnan by Père Delavay in 1886 — brought an entirely new colour to the genus and, through hybridisation with P. suffruticosa, produced the yellow and copper-toned tree peony hybrids now widely available. ‘Souvenir de Maxime Cornu’, with its heavily ruffled apricot-yellow flowers flushed with cerise, is the most spectacular.
In the garden: Give tree peonies space, shelter and patience. Plant with the graft union 15cm below soil level. Do not move once established. Allow ten years to reach full maturity. The investment is repaid by a specimen of increasing, eventually spectacular beauty.
Roses (Rosa chinensis, R. multiflora, R. moyesii and related species)
The Chinese contribution to the rose is one of the most consequential events in the history of ornamental horticulture. The introduction of Rosa chinensis — the China rose — to Europe in the late eighteenth century brought with it the gene for repeat flowering: the ability to produce successive flushes of bloom throughout the growing season rather than a single June explosion. Every modern remontant rose — Hybrid Tea, Floribunda, English rose, Patio rose — owes its ability to flower from June to November to Rosa chinensis and its relatives, introduced from Chinese gardens where they had been in cultivation for centuries.
Rosa chinensis itself is a vigorous, somewhat tender shrub producing small, continuous-flowering blooms in pink and red. Its garden forms — ‘Old Blush’, ‘Slater’s Crimson China’, ‘Hume’s Blush Tea-Scented China’, ‘Parks’ Yellow Tea-Scented China’ — were the four ‘stud China’ roses that crossed with European gallicas, damasks and albas to produce the entire edifice of modern rose breeding. Without these four introductions, and particularly without the remontant gene they carried, the rose as we know it would not exist.
Rosa moyesii is a towering, arching shrub rose from western China, introduced by Wilson in 1903, producing single flowers of a vivid, burning crimson-red in June followed by enormous, bottle-shaped hips in scarlet-orange that are among the most spectacular of all autumn fruit. It is too large and too once-flowering for most gardens (reaching 3 to 4 metres), but its hybrid ‘Geranium’ is more manageable and equally fine-hipped.
Rosa filipes ‘Kiftsgate’ — derived from a Chinese species collected by Wilson — is one of the most vigorous climbing roses in cultivation, capable of reaching 15 metres through a large tree. Its enormous clusters of small, single white flowers in June produce a waterfall of bloom of extraordinary impact. Not for the faint-hearted or the small garden.
Rosa sericea subsp. omeiensis f. pteracantha — the winged-thorn rose from Mount Emei in Sichuan — is grown primarily for the extraordinary ornamental quality of its young thorns: broad, flattened, translucent red wings of extraordinary beauty in spring light. Its small white flowers are four-petalled, unique in the genus. One of the most unusual and visually arresting of all shrubs.
Chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum x morifolium and related species)
The chrysanthemum has been cultivated in China for more than three thousand years — longer than any other flower addressed in this series — and the depth of the cultural, philosophical and horticultural engagement with the plant in China reflects this extraordinary continuity of cultivation. Confucius mentioned chrysanthemums. The poet Tao Yuanming, writing in the fourth century CE, associated the chrysanthemum with reclusion from public life and the virtue of the retired scholar. The Double Ninth Festival — the ninth day of the ninth lunar month — is traditionally celebrated with chrysanthemums, wine infused with chrysanthemum petals, and the composition of chrysanthemum poetry. In Japan, which adopted Chinese chrysanthemum culture and elevated it further, the chrysanthemum became the symbol of the imperial family and appears on the Imperial Seal of Japan.
The wild ancestor of the cultivated chrysanthemum is most likely Chrysanthemum indicum — a small, yellow, single-flowered species native to China and Japan — crossed with several other wild species over centuries of deliberate breeding. The cultivated chrysanthemum’s range of flower forms — single, pompon, spider, quill, reflexed, incurved, anemone-centred — is among the widest available in any single cultivated plant, and the named cultivar range runs to thousands.
For the garden, the Korean chrysanthemum hybrids — hardy, compact, free-flowering and available in a wide colour range from white through yellow, bronze, pink and purple to deep red — are the most garden-worthy of the class. They flower in September and October, extending the season of colour into autumn, and associate beautifully with ornamental grasses, Persicaria and the late-season Heleniums and Rudbeckias.
The species chrysanthemums deserve wider planting than they receive. Chrysanthemum indicum, C. zawadskii (a pink-flowered Siberian species), and C. x rubellum ‘Clara Curtis’ — one of the finest late-season perennials, its single, clear pink flowers borne in great profusion in September and October — are all beautiful, genuinely hardy, and available from specialist suppliers.
Magnolias (Magnolia denudata, M. liliiflora, M. sargentiana and related species)
The magnolia genus has its centre of diversity in the mountains of southwest China, and it is from this region that most of the finest species in cultivation were introduced by the great plant hunters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The genus as a whole is extraordinarily ancient — magnolias pre-date bees, and their flowers are structured to be pollinated by beetles, which are more ancient pollinators — and it contains species of outstanding beauty across a range from small deciduous shrubs to enormous evergreen trees.
Magnolia denudata — the Yulan or lily tree — is the most ancient of the cultivated Chinese magnolias, grown in Chinese monastery gardens for over a thousand years, its pure white flowers producing a spectacular display against the bare branches in February and March before the leaves emerge. It is the magnolia that appears in Chinese paintings as a symbol of purity and the fragile beauty of spring. In the garden it makes a large, eventually broad-crowned tree of 10 to 15 metres, not suited to small spaces but magnificent at maturity.
Magnolia liliiflora — native to southwest China and long cultivated in Chinese and Japanese gardens — produces flowers in deep purple-pink, earlier in its bud stage than when open. Its hybrid with M. stellata, known as the M. x soulangeana group, is the most widely planted magnolia in Western gardens and covers a range from near-white to deep purple-pink. ‘Lennei’, ‘Alexandrina’, ‘Rustica Rubra’ and ‘Susan’ (from the M. liliiflora x M. stellata cross) are all outstanding garden shrubs.
Magnolia sargentiana var. robusta, from Sichuan and Yunnan, produces the largest flowers of any magnolia that can be grown in a British garden — enormous, rose-pink blooms of 30cm or more across on a large tree, produced in March and April with a lavishness that leaves observers visibly overwhelmed. It requires a large garden, a sheltered position and twenty years of patience; the result is among the most spectacular flowering trees available in a temperate climate.
Magnolia wilsonii — Wilson’s magnolia, introduced from Sichuan in 1908 — is a medium-sized deciduous shrub producing pendant, cup-shaped white flowers with a central boss of crimson stamens in May and June. It is among the most refined and garden-worthy of all magnolia species, its pendant flowers most visible when the viewer stands beneath a branch and looks upward.
Primulas (Primula species, particularly the Candelabra group)
The genus Primula is native to temperate regions worldwide, but its greatest concentration of species is in the mountains of southwestern China — Yunnan, Sichuan and Guizhou — where it has radiated into hundreds of species occupying every ecological niche from stream bank to alpine scree. George Forrest alone introduced dozens of Chinese primula species during his seven Yunnan expeditions, and his collections transformed the genus’s representation in Western gardens.
The Candelabra primulas — named for their tiered, candelabra-like arrangement of flower whorls up a tall central stem — are among the most spectacular of all moisture-loving perennials. Primula pulverulenta, with its deep crimson-purple flowers and white-mealy stems, was introduced from Sichuan in 1905. P. japonica, though named for Japan, is native to both Japan and China. P. beesiana (named for Arthur Bulley’s Bees Seeds company, which funded Forrest) is rosy-crimson. P. bulleyana is orange-yellow. P. helodoxa is clear yellow. All require moist, humus-rich, slightly acid soil and flourish at stream and pond margins.
Primula vialii — one of the most extraordinary primulas in cultivation, and quite unlike any other — produces poker-like spikes of flowers that open from the base upward, red in bud opening to lilac-blue, giving the spike a two-toned red-and-blue bicolour effect unlike anything else in the genus. It is native to Yunnan and Sichuan at high altitude and requires cool, moist conditions in cultivation. Spectacular in a cool, damp northern garden; difficult in dry, warm conditions.
Primula forrestii — a shrubby, rhizomatous primula from rocky limestone crevices in Yunnan — produces bright yellow flowers with an orange eye on a plant that grows in the most inhospitable, well-drained conditions imaginable. It is challenging to grow well in British conditions but invaluable in a cool alpine house or a sheltered scree garden.
Clematis (Clematis armandii, C. montana, C. tangutica and related species)
China is the centre of diversity of the genus Clematis, and the wild species from which most garden clematis are derived — or which are themselves outstanding garden plants — is a group of enormous variety and garden importance.
Clematis armandii is the most widely grown of the Chinese evergreen species — a vigorous climber producing clusters of white or pale pink, vanilla-scented flowers in March and April on a plant with handsome, long, glossy, dark green leaves that are ornamental year-round. It requires a sheltered position — the large, evergreen leaves are vulnerable to cold desiccating winds — but in the right conditions it is spectacular, covering a large wall with a single plant within a few years.
Clematis montana is one of the most vigorous and widely planted of all climbing plants — an enormous scrambler capable of reaching 10 metres or more, smothered in small, four-petalled white or pink flowers in May. It is native to the Himalayas and western China, introduced to cultivation in 1831, and now so familiar in British gardens that it is easy to forget its Chinese provenance. ‘Elizabeth’ (pale pink, vanilla-scented) and ‘Rubens’ (pink with bronze foliage) are the classic garden forms.
Clematis tangutica — native to northwestern China and Mongolia — is a different character entirely: a smaller, more refined climber producing nodding, lantern-shaped flowers of clear, bright yellow from July to October, followed by silky, feathery seed heads of great ornamental value that persist well into winter. It is one of the best late-flowering clematis for colour and is more tolerant of exposed conditions than many in the genus.
Clematis macropetala — the Siberian clematis, native also to northern China — is a slender climber producing semi-double, nodding, pale blue flowers of great delicacy in April and May. ‘Markham’s Pink’ and ‘White Swan’ are well-known cultivars. Combined with the contemporaneously flowering Rosa ‘Mutabilis’ (a China rose), it creates one of the most refined early-season combinations available on a sunny wall.
Rhododendrons and Azaleas (Rhododendron species from Yunnan, Sichuan and Tibet)
The genus Rhododendron is native to Asia, Europe, North America and Australasia, but its greatest centre of diversity — the one that produced most of the species now cultivated in Western gardens — is the Sino-Himalayan region: the mountains of Yunnan, Sichuan, Tibet and Burma, at altitudes between 2,000 and 5,000 metres. This region contains several hundred rhododendron species, and the collecting expeditions of Wilson, Forrest, Kingdon-Ward and Rock between 1900 and 1950 introduced an enormous proportion of them to Western cultivation.
Rhododendron sino-grande produces the largest leaves of any hardy rhododendron in cultivation — glossy, dark green above, silvery-white beneath, of extraordinary architectural quality — together with enormous trusses of creamy-white, bell-shaped flowers in April and May. It requires a sheltered, mild garden in a high-rainfall area and is most spectacularly grown in the Atlantic-facing gardens of Cornwall, western Scotland and Ireland.
Rhododendron yakushimanum — technically a Japanese rather than Chinese species but so deeply integrated into the Western rhododendron breeding programme that it belongs here — is the parent of most of the compact, garden-worthy hybrid rhododendrons available today. Its profusion of pink-budded, white-opening flowers above attractive, deep green, felted-beneath leaves makes it one of the most refined and garden-appropriate of all rhododendron species.
Rhododendron augustinii — named for Augustine Henry, an Irish botanist working in China — is a tall, open shrub producing funnel-shaped flowers of a clear, vivid blue-violet that is among the most intense flower colours available in a hardy shrub. It requires acid soil, shelter and relatively mild winters, but in the right position it is without rival for colour intensity in the spring shrub garden.
The deciduous azaleas of Chinese origin — species such as R. luteum (the yellow azalea, fragrant and very easy to grow), R. molle and R. schlippenbachii — contribute both spectacular flower colour and exceptional autumn leaf colour to the woodland garden, their dying leaves in shades of orange, crimson and gold extending the season of interest well into autumn.
Meconopsis (Blue Himalayan Poppies from the Sino-Himalayan Region)
Meconopsis has already been addressed in the poppy guide, but the genus deserves restatement here because its cultural context is specifically Chinese and Himalayan. The blue poppy — a colour that Reginald Farrer, one of the great writer-plant hunters of the early twentieth century, described as ‘the most wonderful blue in the world’ — occurs in several Meconopsis species from Yunnan, Sichuan and Tibet: M. betonicifolia, M. grandis, M. integrifolia (yellow), M. punicea (red), and the fertile hybrid group known as M. ‘Lingholm’ and related names.
The blue of Meconopsis is not quite like any other blue in the plant world — it has a quality of purity and intensity that seems to reflect or emit light rather than absorb it, and it occurs at high altitude in conditions of intense ultraviolet radiation that may play a role in its production. The experience of encountering it in a cool, moist, north-facing Scottish garden in May — the flowers vibrating in a slight breeze above the hairy, silvery-grey foliage — is one of the most intensely memorable available in horticulture, and it is entirely a gift of the Sino-Himalayan mountains.
Camellias (Camellia sinensis, C. japonica, C. sasanqua)
The camellia has a dual cultural identity that perfectly reflects the complexity of the Chinese garden plant in Western cultivation. In China, Camellia sinensis — the tea plant — has been cultivated for its leaves for at least two thousand years, and the entire global tea industry, with its economic and cultural consequences of incalculable scale, derives from a Chinese native plant. The ornamental camellia — C. japonica and its hybrids — was simultaneously being cultivated for its flowers in Chinese and Japanese monastery gardens.
The ornamental camellias reached Europe in the eighteenth century, initially through the Portuguese trading post at Macau, and rapidly became one of the most fashionable of all greenhouse plants in the early nineteenth century, their waxy, perfectly formed flowers the embodiment of the period’s taste for botanical precision and exotic beauty. The discovery that certain varieties — particularly C. japonica cultivars — were hardier than supposed led gradually to their use as outdoor shrubs in milder gardens, a use that is now entirely mainstream.
For the British garden, the most important camellias are the spring-flowering cultivars of C. japonica and the C. x williamsii hybrids (raised from C. japonica x C. saluenensis, the latter a Chinese species introduced from Yunnan by Forrest). The Williams hybrids — ‘Donation’, ‘J.C. Williams’, ‘Caerhays’, ‘Debbie’, ‘Anticipation’ — are more reliably hardy than most japonica varieties, flower over a longer period, and have the self-cleaning habit of dropping spent flowers rather than retaining them browned on the plant.
Camellia sasanqua — a Chinese and Japanese species flowering from October to January — extends the camellia season backward into winter, producing small, often fragrant flowers in white, pink and red on an upright, more sun-tolerant plant than most japonicas. In a sheltered position with southern aspect, autumn-flowering camellias provide one of the most surprising and beautiful displays of the winter garden.
Wisteria (Wisteria sinensis)
Wisteria sinensis — the Chinese wisteria — is among the most spectacular of all flowering climbers and one of the most widely planted in temperate gardens worldwide. Its enormous, pendant racemes of lilac-purple or white flowers — produced in May before the leaves emerge, typically reaching 30 to 60cm in length — have a quality of theatrical abundance that is unmatched in the climbing plant world.
Native to the valleys of central China, introduced to Britain in 1816 by the Canton-based botanist John Reeves, it can cover an enormous area given appropriate support — the famous specimen at Sierra Madre in California covers over an acre of trained framework — and in cultivation on a house wall it requires firm and consistent management to prevent it overwhelming its host.
The cultivation of wisteria is one of the most widely misunderstood aspects of gardening, and failure to flower is the most common complaint. The reasons are almost always: a plant grown from seed rather than a grafted or layered named variety (seed-raised plants can take fifteen or more years to reach flowering size); insufficient sun; excessive nitrogen; or failure to carry out the twice-annual pruning that concentrates the plant’s energy into flower-bud formation rather than vegetative growth. The correct pruning regime is: cut back all new growth to five or six leaves in August, then cut back the same shoots to two or three buds in February. This builds up a system of short, flowering spurs that produces the maximum number of flower racemes.
Wisteria floribunda — the Japanese wisteria, with its even longer racemes (up to 90cm in the variety ‘Multijuga’) and its clockwise twining habit, contrasting with W. sinensis’s anticlockwise twist — is treated alongside Chinese wisteria as an Asian species of equivalent garden value. Both are outstanding.
Forsythia, Deutzia and Philadelphus: The Spring Shrub Framework
Several shrub genera that form the structural framework of the temperate spring garden are Chinese in origin, and while they have perhaps become so familiar as to be taken for granted, their origins deserve acknowledgement.
Forsythia — whose cascading yellow flowers are among the most reliable of all early-spring signals — derives primarily from F. suspensa, a Chinese species introduced in the early nineteenth century. The familiar garden forsythias are hybrids derived from this and related species, and their universal garden presence reflects the ease and reliability that characterise the best Chinese shrub introductions.
Deutzia — a genus of medium-sized deciduous shrubs producing masses of white or pink flowers in May and June — is native primarily to China and Japan. Several species were introduced by Wilson from his Sichuan and Hubei collections: D. longifolia, D. setchuenensis and the beautiful D. x elegantissima are among the finest, their flowers of considerable delicacy and their overall garden performance reliable and undemanding.
Philadelphus — mock orange — is native to North and Central America but the most floriferous species, P. delavayi and P. coronarius, include Chinese representatives among their relatives. The delicate, white, intensely orange-fragrant flowers of Philadelphus in June are one of the defining scents of the summer garden.
Buddleia (Buddleja davidii)
Buddleja davidii — the butterfly bush — is so universally present in British gardens and indeed in the wild (where it has naturalised extensively on brownfield sites, railway cuttings and demolition sites) that its Chinese origin requires active acknowledgement. It is native to the Sichuan and Yunnan provinces of China, where it grows on rocky slopes and stream margins at altitude, introduced to cultivation by the Père Armand David — a French missionary and naturalist after whom it is named — who discovered it in the 1860s.
Its nectar-rich flowers, produced from July to October in large, arching plumes of purple, white or pink, are among the most important late-summer nectar sources for butterflies in Britain, with tortoiseshells, peacocks, painted ladies, red admirals, small whites and the comma all visiting regularly. For ecological purposes, native wildflowers are invariably preferable for supporting insects across their complete life cycle, but as a single-species butterfly magnet in the ornamental garden, buddleia has earned its ubiquitous place.
The named cultivars — ‘Black Knight’ (deep purple), ‘White Profusion’ (white), ‘Pink Delight’ (warm pink), ‘Nanho Blue’ (compact, light blue-purple) — vary in size, colour and habit, and the cutting back of all stems to 30cm in early spring produces the most vigorous growth and the largest flower plumes.
Wild Flowers of China: Some Outstanding Species
Beyond the well-known genera and the plants most commonly encountered in cultivation, the Chinese flora contains numerous species of outstanding botanical and horticultural interest that are less widely grown but equally deserving of attention.
Cardiocrinum giganteum — the giant Himalayan lily — is native to the forests of western China and the eastern Himalayas and is among the most dramatic of all garden bulbs. A mature flowering specimen produces a stem of 2.5 to 3.5 metres in height, carrying a succession of enormous, trumpet-shaped, creamy-white flowers with purple-streaked interiors in July. The fragrance is powerful and sweet. After flowering, the monocarpic plant dies, producing in its place a cluster of offsets that will flower in three to five years — a botanical relay race of extraordinary beauty and extraordinary patience. In suitable conditions — cool, moist, humus-rich, acid soil in light shade — it is among the most magnificent of all garden plants.
Actaea (Cimicifuga) simplex — the autumn bugbane — is a tall, late-flowering woodland perennial native to China and Siberia, producing white, slightly scented bottle-brush flower spikes in September and October on a plant of bold, compound foliage. The black-leaved forms — ‘Brunette’, ‘Black Negligee’, ‘Hillside Black Beauty’ — are among the most dramatic dark-foliaged plants in the garden, their white flower spikes appearing in startling contrast above the near-black leaves.
Rodgersia species — native to China, Japan and Korea — are large, dramatically foliaged waterside perennials producing astilbe-like plumes of white or pink flowers in June and July above leaves of great architectural presence. R. pinnata, R. podophylla and R. aesculifolia are all outstanding waterside plants, their bold, palmate or pinnate foliage providing textural interest across the entire season.
Kirengeshoma palmata — native to Japan and Korea but closely related to Chinese species — is a tall, arching woodland perennial producing distinctive, waxy, pale yellow, shuttlecock-shaped flowers in August and September. It requires cool, moist, acid, humus-rich soil and is one of the finest late-season plants for the woodland garden.
Tricyrtis species — the toad lilies of China, Japan and Taiwan — produce extraordinarily intricate, orchid-like flowers in white, lilac, purple and pink, heavily spotted, on arching stems from August to October. They are plants of moist woodland in their natural habitat and perform best in cool, humus-rich, partially shaded conditions. The flowers, examined closely, are among the most complex and beautiful in the garden.
Anemone hupehensis and A. x hybrida — the Japanese anemones, whose common name obscures their Chinese provenance — are native to the hills of Hubei province, where they grow in semi-shaded, rocky conditions. Introduced to Western cultivation by Robert Fortune in 1844, their tall, wiry stems carrying cups of white or pink flowers above deeply divided leaves from August to October have made them indispensable plants of the late-season garden. They spread by underground runners and can be vigorous to the point of invasiveness in suitable conditions, but the autumn garden without Japanese anemones is a poorer place.
Growing Chinese Plants: Practical Principles
The diversity of Chinese flora spans such an extraordinary range of habitats — from tropical cloud forest in Yunnan to subarctic mountain in Manchuria, from coastal marshland to alpine limestone scree — that no single set of cultivation rules applies to all Chinese plants. However, several generalisations are worth making.
The Sino-Himalayan species — the rhododendrons, primulas, meconopsis, magnolias and related plants from the mountains of Yunnan, Sichuan and Tibet — typically require: acid to neutral, humus-rich, moisture-retentive but well-drained soil; cool, humid conditions; protection from drying winds; and, in many cases, high rainfall or consistent supplementary watering. They are most at home in the Atlantic-climate gardens of western Britain, Ireland and western Scotland, where the combination of mild winters, high rainfall and cool summers replicates their Himalayan foothill habitat more closely than the drier, hotter summers of the south and east.
The deciduous shrubs and trees of central and eastern China — the magnolias, forsythias, deutzias, wisterias, buddleias — are generally more tolerant of a range of conditions, including drier soils and more continental climates, reflecting their origin in regions with more extreme seasonal variation. Most perform well across the full range of British garden conditions given appropriate drainage and reasonable fertility.
The peonies and other perennials require the conditions described in the peony guide elsewhere in this series — deep, fertile, well-drained soil, neutral to alkaline pH for the tree peonies and neutral to slightly acid for the herbaceous species, and patience through the establishment period.
Conservation and the Wild Chinese Flora
The extraordinary richness of the Chinese native flora is under serious and accelerating threat. Habitat loss — from agricultural expansion, urbanisation, infrastructure development and the collection of wild plants for the traditional medicine trade — is eliminating Chinese plant species at a rate that outpaces the capacity of botanical institutions to document and conserve them. The IUCN Red List records hundreds of Chinese plant species as threatened, and the true number is likely far higher given the incomplete state of botanical surveys in many regions.
Botanical gardens — including the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chengdu Botanical Garden, and their international partners including Kew, Edinburgh and various Chinese provincial botanical gardens — are engaged in ex-situ conservation programmes of considerable scale. The Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst has worked with Chinese partners to collect and store seed of hundreds of Chinese species. These efforts are important, but they are secondary to the protection of wild habitats where the plants evolved and where the genetic diversity most essential for the species’ long-term survival is concentrated.
For the Western gardener, the practical contribution is threefold: to grow Chinese native species rather than only their hybrids and cultivars, supporting the diversity of the parent species in cultivation; to source plants from reputable nurseries that do not deal in wild-collected material; and to support organisations — the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Botanic Gardens Conservation International, Plantlife — engaged in conservation of wild plant habitats worldwide.
A Garden Made From a Continent
The Chinese flora is not a theme for a specialised garden, though themed Chinese-inspired gardens of great beauty exist and are worth visiting. It is the invisible foundation of the temperate ornamental garden as a whole — the source of the genes, the species and the cultivars without which the garden tradition of Europe and North America would be almost unrecognisably impoverished.
To grow a Chinese plant — a tree peony, a regale lily, a blue meconopsis, a magnolia raised from seed collected in Sichuan — is to participate, however modestly, in a relationship between Chinese nature and human cultivation that is three thousand years old. The plant in the garden carries its origin within it as surely as it carries its genetics. To understand where it came from, and what was required to bring it here, is to find in a flowering shrub or a single stem in a vase a depth of meaning that the RHS label does not convey — and that rewards the curiosity it invites.
Key species for the garden: Paeonia rockii hybrids, Paeonia suffruticosa, Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’, Rosa sericea pteracantha, Clematis armandii, Clematis tangutica, Magnolia wilsonii, Magnolia sargentiana, Primula pulverulenta, Primula vialii, Rhododendron augustinii, Meconopsis ‘Lingholm’, Camellia x williamsii hybrids, Wisteria sinensis, Cardiocrinum giganteum, Anemone x hybrida, Tricyrtis species, Rodgersia species.
Essential reading: ‘Aristocrats of the Garden’ by Ernest H. Wilson; ‘Plant Hunting in China’ by E.H.M. Cox; ‘The Flowers of South Yunnan’ and related works by George Forrest; ‘The English Garden’ issues on Sino-Himalayan flora; and the RHS plant database for current cultivar information.
For specialist Chinese plant sourcing: Crug Farm Plants (wales, crucially important for species plants), Pan-Global Plants (panglobalplants.com), Burncoose Nurseries (burncoose.co.uk), and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh plant sales (rbge.org.uk).
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