Will Purdom This overlooked Victorian

Relaxing in Peking, plant hunter Will Purdom packed a great deal into his relatively short life.

The Forgotten Man

Compared to the big names of the Victorian era, Will Purdom is an overlooked plant hunter, but he nevertheless left his mark on British gardens, says Francois Gordon

William Purdom, who died suddenly in Peking 100 years ago last November, packed a great deal into his short life. A head gardener’s son from Westmoreland (now Cumbria) he trained at Kew where he was elected Secretary of the Kew Employees Union. In 1905, aged just 25, he lobbied the Board of Agriculture for better pay and conditions at Kew and was promptly sacked for ‘agitation’ by the director, William ThiseltonDyer. Labour Members of Parliament protested that civil servants were entitled to join a union and Thiselton-Dyer was ordered to reinstate Will. Faced with this humiliating public reversal, he resigned – an extraordinary outcome to a David-andGoliath dispute between the director and a ‘student gardener’, the most junior grade of Kew employee.

In 1907, Will led the only ever strike by Kew student gardeners and drew public attention to their low wages. It is perhaps not surprising that in 1908 the new director, Colonel Prain, enthusiastically recommended Will to Harry Veitch, the premier British nurseryman of the age, and Charles Sprague Sargent, the director of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, as the very man they needed for a three-year expedition to China in search of plants and trees new to Western science and horticulture.

Whether or not there was any ulterior motive behind the recommendation, Will was well qualified for the job. On leaving school at 14, he had trained with his father, the head gardener at Brathay Hall in Windermere, and had worked for two leading London nurseries before training at Kew, where he was sub-foreman of the arboretum. He would also prove to have a good eye for a plant worth collecting and an impressive capacity for the sheer hard work, often in difficult, sometimes dangerous, circumstances, required of him.

Sargent was the driving force behind the expedition. He was convinced there were new plants and trees waiting to be discovered in northern and northwestern China and in eastern Tibet where winters are so bitterly cold he hoped they would be fully hardy in New England. (In fact, although plants from this region will survive very low winter temperatures, they are also acutely vulnerable to late spring frosts, which do not occur in their native range.) Veitch, for his part, had made a handsome profit from the sale of the handkerchief tree, Davidia involucrata, and other Chinese plants collected by Ernest Wilson and hoped that Will would find “some really good things” that would redound to his firm’s credit, figuratively and literally.

Will worked hard to learn Mandarin Chinese and, unusually for a Westerner in China at this time, consistently treated administrators and local farmers as his social equals. As a result, he was allowed into areas of China where foreign travellers were actively discouraged, not least for their own safety. He spent the 1909 collecting season in northern China and Mongolia, mostly in the Wutai-shan, the former Imperial hunting reserve.

Purdom’s first trip to China was in 1909; he learnt Mandarin in preparation. Sargent tasked Will with collecting seeds from pines and larches that were not in cultivation in the West, but the wet summer of 1909 meant the trees did not set seed. Although Will sent cuttings and seedlings, many died on the six-week journey to Boston and Sargent was only partly mollified by the 30 parcels of seeds and bulbs from more than 300 other plant species that Will despatched to Boston and London over the course of the year. These included rhododendrons and primulas, a fine blue anemone, several peonies and three clematis, of which ‘downy clematis’, Clematis macropetala, has graceful, deep blue, bell-shaped flowers. It first flowered in Veitch’s Coombe Wood nursery in 1912 and remains popular today. For Sargent, there were poplars, elms and a new bird cherry, Prunus padus, a small tree with copious white racemes, red berries and fine foliage. P. padus thrived in the Arnold Arboretum, where today it makes a spectacular autumn display. In 1910, Will left Peking for western China and Tibet’s Amdo region. Sargent had asked him to investigate the Moutan-shan, the

“peony mountain” west of the ancient city of X’ian where he hoped Will would find the original wild peony, but the plants had long ago been grubbed up for traditional medicines and the mountain was bare. Will fared better in Kansu (now Gansu) province, where he found the winter-flowering Viburnum fragrans. He sent seeds to Veitch, who grew them on and sold his stock to Gerald Loder, owner of Wakehurst Place in Sussex, where in 1920 they flowered for the first time in Britain. Will also found a rhododendron with pink buds shading into white flowers, subsequently named R. purdomii, and collected over 500 seeds of a dark red peony, Paeonia x suffruticosa, which was raised in both Boston and Coombe Wood. He also sent seed from an edible honeysuckle, Lonicera caerulea, whose curious cylindrical fruits are today sold as honeyberry. 1911 found Will in Amdo, and then in Minchow, Kansu, where he had to wait for order to be restored following the chaos that flowed from the Xinhai Revolution in October. Fortunately, he had more or less completed the season’s collecting, which included several fine primulas and asters, and in spring 1912 he was able to return to Peking, thence home to England on the Trans-Siberian Express.

Both Veitch and Sargent were disappointed by how few ‘novelties’ Will had sent home, but while Veitch was philosophical, saying “If the plants weren’t there, he couldn’t send them”, Sargent felt Will simply hadn’t tried hard enough. Today we know that the region where Will was collecting, which had been chosen by Sargent, is not rich in endemic species, especially when compared to Yunnan, where Wilson had collected successfully for the Arnold Arboretum. His sponsors’ lack of enthusiasm meant that Will’s achievements went largely unrecognised on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the summer of 1913, Will was invited by Reginald Farrer to join him, for his expenses only,

Purdom in Peking; he went on to settle in China and became the Chinese government’s forestry adviser.

ALAN PURDOM; STEN RIDDERLÖF; SHUTTERSTOCK

IMAGES

Clematis macropetala Rhododendron purdomii Paeonia x suffruticosa Lonicera caerulea

Left Setting up camp during a 1914 expedition. This image It was during their 1915 expedition that Farrer and Purdom discovered Gentiana farreri while seeking out new alpine plants. Below Pretty blossom of Prunus padus.

on a plant-hunting expedition to China. Will was by now fluent in Mandarin with good contacts in China, and Farrer wanted him to act as manager and guide. Will was hoping to join the nascent Chinese Forestry Service and would be better able to pursue this from China than from Cumbria. He accepted Farrer’s offer and in January 1914 returned to Peking to be joined by Farrer in March.

The two men travelled to Will’s 1911 and 1912 stamping-ground of Kansu and Amdo, where they discovered Viburnum fragrans growing in the wild (this entitled Farrer, as the leader of the expedition, to name it: with typical vanity he called it Viburnum farreri), a very fine hellebore, beautiful Buddleja alternifolia, and a stunning white peony. But Farrer was mainly interested in alpines, so they headed west towards the high Tibetan plateau, where they made a rich harvest of anemones, primulas and poppies.

Like so many others, Will and Farrer believed that World War I would “all be over by Christmas”, and they spent the autumn collecting seeds from plants they had marked over the course of the summer. By the end of 1914, the devastating impact of the war on British horticulture had become plain and Farrer’s plans to fund the next year’s expedition from sales of seeds and plants were unfeasible. Undaunted, they continued to collect over the course of 1915, finding probably the best single plant of the whole expedition, Gentiana farreri, a lovely blue alpine that has proved fully hardy in Britain, before returning to Peking in autumn. The following spring Farrer made the perilous journey home via Moscow and Norway, while Will began his new career as forestry adviser to the Chinese government.

Readers who are keen to find out more about the work Will undertook to restore China’s forests, how he captured the heart of the daughter of an earl, and his tragically early death, may enjoy the biography of Purdom released last year. I hope readers will also think of Will the next time they see “his” viburnum or clematis, a bird cherry or Buddleja alternifolia. n

Will Purdom: Agitator, Plant-hunter, Forester by Francois Gordon is published by RBGE (RRP £18.99). Visit rbgeshop.org to order.