CHAPTER 5 pp.92-159
18/2/11
10:44 am
Page 110
Spectacular mountainous countryside seen from the summit of Tianthu Shan near Changyang. The silvery plumes of Miscanthus sinensis may be seen to the left. The last Western plant hunter to collect in this region before our 2004 visit was E. H. Wilson.
believe that everything in nature, whether a mountain, tree or stream, contains its own spirit and that miniature examples possess it in concentrated form. A contorted, gnarled shape was thought to represent the bodies of those in the world beyond mortality, where they attained great age. Out of these beliefs, the art of penjing emerged. A few hundred years after its birth in China, penjing became popular in Japan. The Chinese word for a pot plant is penzai; the same characters are pronounced ‘bonsai’ by the Japanese.6 Several different styles were practiced in this little town; some plants were superbly trained as solitary trees, while other containers had entire groves, with large rocks adding beautifully to the miniature landscapes. The examples we saw had been produced by digging old, gnarled, stunted plants from the local mountains. These were then cut hard back and some of the resultant shoots had been trained and retrained for a number of years before being potted into their shallow earthenware and terracotta containers. The most popular subjects used in Gaoyang were Mahonia bealei, Distylium racemosum, Adina rubella, Ginkgo biloba, Ilex pernyi and a heavily fruited persimmon, Diospyros 110
armata. The latter was discovered by Henry near Liantuo in 1888 and was introduced by Wilson 16 years later. Wilson described it as a very rare tree and knew it from only one or two localities in Hubei. By riversides, Pterocarya hupehensis made 10-m (33-ft) tall trees, and, beside it, we collected seeds from the globular fruiting clusters of Camptotheca acuminata; Henry himself had collected this tree in Changyang. Camptotheca is known as the ‘happy tree’ or ‘cancer tree’. It is a handsome deciduous tree of rapid growth and can reach about 25 m (82 ft) high, with recorded girths of up to 2 m (6.5 ft). It is found throughout western and central China, though, like Henry’s persimmon, Wilson recorded it as being rare in Hubei Province. The genus was discovered by Père Armand David on the Lushan (Mount Lu) range in Jiangxi Province in 1868. In traditional Chinese herbal medicine, the fruits of this species are used to treat patients suffering from cancer of the digestive tract and leukaemia. The active compound, which shows such promise in treating cancer, is camptothecine, and cultivars with higher yields of this compound are being developed. Indigenous to China, it is