A beauty of many names and places

Do not be put off by the silly sub-title: this is an admirable book on several levels. Botanical origins; plant-hunting; the arrival of plants in England; hybridisation, and the American connections. There is much history, including that of great gardens like Exbury. All is here, plus some gorgeous illustrations, including one of Marion Dorn, designer of rhododendron-inspired fabrics, doing her bit to mitigate the rigours of postwar Crippsean austerity in 1947.

Rhododendrons (now including azaleas) are calcifuge plants, happy in lime-free soil; hence keen cultivation in the Surrey Alps, in sour patches elsewhere and in peat and sand in the Celtic fringe. In nature, rhododendrons range from huge trees or shrubs, 500 years old, to tiny plants, flowers the size of daisies, sometimes counter-intuitively surviving in cracks in limestone cliffs. Some species are tropical, some alpine; some deciduous, some evergreen, some easy, some difficult to propagate. The great Himalayan heartland, westward from the Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan, is where more than half the world’s rhododendrons originated. But there are natives in Japan, the south-eastern United States (when colonies), and New Zealand. One luteum has nectar so poisonous that luteum honey can kill. The author does not tell us whether the poison can be traced in the victim’s body, but better not try this at home.

The relationship between rhodo- dendrons, magnolias and the heaths may well be uncovered when more genetic testing becomes possible to replace doubt. Plant-hunters, who botanised widely from the early 18th century, are described here as heroes, some plants being found as a by-product of the search for tea species after the Treaty of Nanking (1842); others were collected because of ‘rhododendron madness’ in the 1860s. ‘This was the time when the money spent on rhododendrons during 20 years in this country [England] would nearly suffice to pay off the National Debt.’