THE BOTANIC Bear Grylls
How Scot risked his life to make your garden grow
HE was the intrepid Scot who risked his life traversing uncharted valleys and forests on the other side of the world to collect exotic plants.
His daring escapades in China and the Himalayas, cataloguing more than 1,200 plants and surviving ambush by native warriors, changed British gardens forever.
Now, more than a century on, George Forrest – an adventurer in the mould of Bear Grylls – will be celebrated in lights at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) where he launched his career. Falkirk-born Forrest was a clerk there when he answered an advert looking for ‘a young man well up in hardy plants to go out to the East and collect’.
But his first expedition was left in ruins after his team was massacred by warrior priests, or lamas, in the Yunnan province of China.
Sole survivor Forrest escaped only because an indigenous tribe disguised him to dodge hunting parties and spirited him away to Tibet.
Yet despite his experience, Forrest returned six times, collecting tens of thousands of plants, herbarium specimens and seeds, and cataloguing previously unknown species.
In RBGE’s herbarium, where dried specimens for scientific study are stored, more than 30,000 specimens collected by Forrest show how his travels not only brought new material to horticulture but gave botanists in Britain a new understanding of a rich and unique flora.
His work introduced to British gardens many familiar species of primula, rhododendron, iris, camellia, clematis, gentian, jasmine and conifer from their native China.
Today more than 50 original Forrest introductions and their descendants can still be seen growing at RBGE, where this year’s annual Botanic Lights event will take thousands of visitors in the footsteps of Victorian plant hunters and their modern contemporaries.
Garden manager Martyn Dickson, who has travelled regularly to China for more than 16 years, said: ‘The more you learn about what Forrest endured and what he travelled through, the more he inspires you.
‘Going to the places where he was based you see the plants and think: “These are in the Botanics.” The reason we have them is because he spent so much of his life working out there and enduring all sorts to bring them back. We no longer face being hunted down by the local people – we work with them. Forrest’s travels took him in to remote areas where his life was on the line.’
Forrest, whose family moved to Kilmarnock when he was
12, embarked on his first foreign adventure in 1891 when he went to Australia, hoping to make his fortune in the gold rush. He died of a heart attack in 1932, not far from his base at Tengyueh, where he was later buried alongside his friend George Litton who accompanied him on his adventures. His work features in the RBGE’s Chinese Hillside at the Botanic Lights. Director of enterprise Heather Jackson said: ‘Each ticket sold will help fund our important work.’