Ernest 'Chinese' Wilson - botanist adventurer and plant hunter

Many of Britain's favourite garden plants were brought to the country by adventurer botanists, who made challenging journeys around the world to bring back new species. One of these plant hunters was Ernest Wilson, who travelled widely in China at the turn of the 19th century.

Ernest Wilson was known as ‘Chinese’ Wilson after his very successful expeditions to China between 1899 and 1905. Much of his collecting was carried out while employed by the famous Veitch Nurseries. 'Chinese' Wilson is credited with the introduction of over 1,000 significant plant species.

The plants he brought back to the west include many roses and rhododendrons, as well as popular clematis types like Clematis armandii and Clematis montana var. rubens.

In 1899 nurseryman, Henry Veitch commissioned the young Kew trained botanist Ernest Wilson to bring back seeds of the Handkerchief tree from China.

Wilson had never been abroad before and so at the tender age of 22 began his life of adventuring with a nightmare journey, full of danger and frustration. He only had a hand-drawn map and a few written instructions to guide him into the remote Yunnan region of China in search of the single known existing specimen. On his way, he escaped local bandits, was imprisoned on suspicion of spying, survived an epidemic of deadly fever and nearly drowned when his boat overturned in a rocky river.

After enduring all these hardships, when he finally found the much-vaunted tree, to Wilson’s dismay he saw that it had been cut down and used to build a house! Bitterly disappointed, Wilson turned to collecting other plants and then stumbled across a clump of the Handkerchief trees by accident. But it was still not straightforward to bring back his prize. The trees were in flower and with the threat of the anti-foreigner Boxer rebellion brewing around him, he had to wait weeks for the seeds to develop. At long last he had them and was able to send them back to England.

He went on to spend many years in China and became one of the best-known plant hunters of his generation, before dying in a car accident in America.