NATURAL HISTORY
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The flora of the Colony is tropical, although at about the northern limit of tropical flora. Alternation between hot humid summers and cool dry winters causes tropical plants to lie dormant during winter and encourages the development of large flowers borne at definite seasons of the year. As a result of this a genus tends to produce a greater wealth of flowers of large size in Hong Kong than it does in other equatorial countries.
Hong Kong is famous for its great variety of flowering plants, many of which are exceptional for the beauty or fragrance of their blossoms. As might be expected most species flower during spring and early summer. Some are easy to place in their correct families- for example, the common wild gordonia looks like, and is related to, the camellia, and the wild roses are unmistakably roses. But most are not so easy to name. They include a magnolia, a michelia with large white flowers, a rhodoleia with groups of rose-madder coloured petals surrounded by golden bracts, an illicium with cherry pink flowers and star-shape fruits, and a Tutcheria with large camellia-like flowers, white tinged with gold bearing masses of tangerine orange stamens. This latter is a tall tree with glossy foliage, described as a distinct genus in 1908 in honour of W. J. Tutcher, former Superintendent of the then Botanical and Forestry Department. A local styrax with fragrant flowers is reminiscent of the halesia, the American snowdrop tree. Six species of rhododendron grow wild in the Colony. Of these the red one is extremely abundant, while another with large pale pink flowers is so rare that it is known to exist only on one shoulder of Victoria Peak. The heather family is represented by a very lovely enkianthus which bears beautiful pink bells in early spring at the time of the Chinese New Year. Flowering at the same time is a litsea with small creamy white and exceedingly fragrant flowers borne in profusion on leafless branches.
The Bauhinia Blakeana, named after a former Governor, Sir Henry Blake, and discovered in 1908 by the Fathers of the French Foreign Missions at Pok Fu Lam, is among the finest of the bauhinia genus anywhere in the world. Its origin is unknown and it is a sterile hybrid, never producing seed. Another related species is Bauhinia glauca, climbing by means of tendrils, with bunches of pink flowers of sufficient beauty to merit cultivation as a covering for trellises and porches.