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FRIENDS OF THE HKBRAS TRIP TO CORNWALL
KIRSTY NORMAN
In April 2002, 25 members of the Friends of the RAS Hong Kong Branch took part in the group's first Monday-Friday organised tour, thanks to the excellent teamwork and organisation of Anita Wilson, Rosemary Lee and Penny Byrne.
The group visited six gardens in eastern Cornwall, in order to look specifically at oriental planting, and the connections between Cornwall and the early plant hunters. Given the county's place in the history of early oriental plant introductions, there are many gardens to choose from, but in this choice we were fortunate to have the help of the remarkable Maggie Campbell-Culver, author of the recently published and well received The Origin of Plants and previously in charge of the gardens at Mount Edgcumbe, and also her husband Michael Culver. Both had become close friends of Penny Byrne and her husband Tim Heald while neighbours in Fowey. Maggie's love of her subject, and her instinctive ability to strike a balance between educating us and allowing us to roam made her a very popular guide and companion.
The group met in Fowey on the Monday, visited two gardens a day for three days, and dispersed on the Friday. The trip also included that essential of a Friends outing, good Chinese food, in the form of two fine dinners organised by Penny. Gardens visited were Trewithen, Pine Lodge, Tregrehan, Heligan, Caerhays, and also the Eden Project, though Eden is perhaps more of a phenomenon than a garden.
The great Cornish gardens we now know were, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the testing grounds for what was to become a veritable torrent of newly discovered plant material, much of it being brought or sent back from China, Japan, Korea and the Himalayas. The way was paved by men like Major General Thomas Hardwicke (1755-1835) of the Bengal Artillery, who brought the first Himalayan rhododendron to Britain in the early 19th century. Discoveries were made by missionaries such as Père Armand David and Père Jean Delavay in the late 19th century, but it was in the early 20th century when professional explorer-collectors such as Ernest Wilson, George Forrest, Frank Kingdom Ward, and Reginald Farrer began systematic