Flowers in the sky: A band of Kiwi adventurers tracks down a rich botanical bounty in the mountains of China's Yunnan province

摘要

We are following a perfectly flat footpath in an intricate pattern of paving blocks and small rounded stones. It's brand new and a solid handrail lines the route, which is just as well because it snakes along a perpendicular cliff with a sheer drop down the mountainside below. Here and there craggy rhododendrons cling to the rocks in company with all manner of shrubs and small trees. We easily identify a shrub with bright yellow flowers as hypericum, but it is not a species we know. In a sheltered boggy cleft we come across a colony of a familiar cream-flowered rodgersia, which is overhung by a pink deutzia and a tall rose splattered with small, bright-eyed flowers the colour of carmine.