ENG-1954 — Page 309

HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT, 1954

Mr. G. B. Bentham, one of the most distinguished botanists of his time, with considerable experience of other floras, said in part in writing of Hong Kong: "One is struck with the very large total amount of species crowded among so small an island, with the tropical character of the great majority of species, and with the very great diversity in the species themselves."

The flora of this Colony is tropical in nature but it is at about the northern limit of the tropical flora. Hong Kong has hot and humid summers and dry cool winters and this alternation results in a dormant period for the tropical plants during the winter. It would seem that these conditions promote the development of large flowers borne at definite seasons of the year. The consequence is that a genus represented both in Hong Kong and Malaya (where the climate is tropical) produces a greater wealth of flowers and of a larger size here than in the more uniform tropics of the equatorial belt.

There is an amazing wealth of flowering shrubs and trees, many with very beautiful and fragrant flowers. Some are easy to place in their correct families; for example, the common wild Gordonia looks like and is related to 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, a

a Tutcheria with large Camellia-like flowers, white tinged with gold, and with masses of tangerine orange stamens. Six species of Rhododendron grow wild in the Colony; of these one is extremely abundant, another so rare that it is only

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