Princess House Fantasia Ruby Red

[Skye Severy]

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We tend to take our planet for granted. Complacently, we assume that the unknown parts of it were explored long ago, that the adventure and excitement and romance of penetrating faraway lands vanished with the hobble skirt and turkey trot.

But one of the strangest stories in the annals of plant exploration was unfolded 16 years ago with the abrupt publication by Dr. Herman Sleumer, a Dutch botanist, of descriptions of 96 new species of rhododendrons.

When all the discoveries of the previous three decades were brought together in orderly array, taxonomists were disconcerted to learn that the size of the genus was increased by half, in one stroke, to about 900 species. Hobbyists were startled to hear that the newcomers were ever blooming and that they came in "high octane" scarlets and yellows as well as in psychedelic combinations of orange and pink. The flowers of some were mammoth, with trumpets an incredible eight inches across. Oddest of all, most were epiphytic, growing high on forest tree limbs with mosses and orchids, rather than rooting solidly in the ground.

With the great wonder at such marvels came much speculation about their origins. How was it possible in mid-century for any wilderness on earth to yield so many new rhododendrons never before seen by man?

The story goes back to 1823 when Dr. William Jack "of the late East India Company's service" discovered in Sumatra a rhododendron with small cerise-crimson flowers and bizarre appearance, later called R. malayanum . (At the time, the only known Asiatic rhododendron was the blood-red flowered tree from India, R. arboreum , forerunner of multitudes of popular garden hybrids.) Jack's discovery was followed before 1845 by R. jasminiflorum , with exotic white flowers stained deep pink in the center, sent from Malacca to the James Vietch & Sons Nursery at Exeter by their collector, Thomas Lobb. (Soon thereafter came the ever more flamboyant R. javanicum from Java, with electrifying orange flowers spotted red, and purple anthers.) R. jasminiflorum bloomed for the first time in 1849 and was proudly exhibited by Lobb's employer at the Royal Horticultural Society's first show of the year 1850. It was so unlike any rhododendron known, a reporter implied it was not rhododendron at all.

It was the next year, 1851, when Hugh Low, a government official at Labuan Island, made a remarkable climb to 13,500 feet on a mountain in nearby Borneo in the course of which he discovered a rhododendron which he called R. brookeanum . It was named for his dear friend, the celebrated Rajah of Sarawak, Sir James Brooke. The flowers, beautiful orange-pink with an ivory center, were a sensational find.

Low's journey to climb Mount Kina Balu was a dramatic one. As he rounded a bend in his little boat on the Tauran River, he was suddenly confronted with a fleet of war canoes in full regalia, led by a notorious pirate with the comic-opera title, Sultan of Layer-Layer, who later in the year was to behead the British adventurer, Robert Burns. But the encounter was one of welcome; Low's reputation for love of the country and affection for its natives had preceded him.

After the final agonizing climb to the summit of the mountain, numbed with cold in the rarified air, he made a gesture of the sort which built the Empire. Encountering a cliff near the top, with an awesome drop to the valley below, he lay down to peer over the edge and there toasted Her Majesty with a bottle of Madeira. He placed the empty bottle in a gully, where it was found seven years later by a friend on a second ascent.

Low's coppery yellow Rhododendron brookeanum bloomed in England in 1855, a novelty of such interest that it "attracted great attention" when it was exhibited at a Royal Horticultural Society show. " R. lobbii " (now R. longiflorum) , bright glossy crimson, came in from Borneo in 1870. Fifteen years later " R. teysmannii " (now R. javanicum var. teysmannii ), from Sumatra and Penang, was given an award by the Society for its deep golden-yellow flowers when it was first shown. R. multicolor aptly described the variety of hues to be found in the flowers of the species which arrived shortly afterward in England. The Society awarded it a First Class Certificate in 1883.

A frenzy of hybridizing was in progress with the tropical rhododendrons of the Malay Archipelago in the greenhouses of the Veitch firm which had sponsored the equatorial explorations. From the seven species sent back to England by their collectors in the preceding 30 years several hundred new hybrids were produced for the glasshouses of the gentry. The first and most famous was 'Princess Royal,' a glowing pink which astounded its breeder because it came from a white crossed with a yellow species. He was even more bemused when the white R. jasminiflorum , crossed with the strong pink 'Princess Royal,' produced the snowy 'Princess Alexandra.'

Privileged amateurs were also attempting crosses among the newcomers. J. H. Mangles, well known as a plantsman and for the prolixity of his contributions to gardening publications, in describing an exasperating failure, repeated the admonition of a friend: there are "certain atmospheric moments for the union of vegetable species," he wrote. "Never try such things when an east wind is blowing." The advice surely ranks as history's most singular explanation for the failure of crosses to produce seeds.

By 1877 the Veitch catalog was offering the scarlet flowered 'Duchess of Edinburgh'. In 1882 the Messers. Veitch announced, with no great show of diffidence, that no fewer than 16 of their hybrids had received Certificates of Merit from either the Royal Horticultural Society or the Royal Botanic Society. Owners of the spacious Victorian conservatories loaded the waiting lists for the latest creations from the Chelsea nursery. They came to be known as "javanicum" hybrids.

In 1866 the acquisitive appetites of whiskered readers in stately mansions were titillated by offers of double flowered hybrids for their greenhouses. The wizards at Veitch had produced gardenia-like rhododendrons in white, pink, crimson, yellow and orange of such extraordinary durability that they lasted six to seven weeks in good condition.

By 1893 Veitch's catalog listed scores of hybrid cultivars; four years later the year-round flowering of the Veitch hybrids was demonstrated by exhibiting a tray of cut blooms at every fortnightly meeting of the Royal Horticultural Society throughout 1897.

But it all came to a sudden end. For at the height of the popularity of the Malaysians, there sprang into the horticultural world a second burst of hybridizing that rivaled and quickly overwhelmed the Malaysian fancy. Hundreds of new species of rhododendrons were suddenly pouring in from that vast continent to the north, Mainland Asia.

Reports of rhododendrons found by French Catholic missionaries on the mountain slopes of western China and the Himalaya were circulating in Britain, so Veitch sent out E. H. "Chinese" Wilson to investigate further. After all, these Mainland rhododendrons could be expected to survive outdoors; the Malaysians were then believed to require hothouse conditions. Within two years Wilson sent back to his delighted employers 40 new, hardy, Mainland species.

In one decade of the 20th century's early years an astounding 312 novel rhododendrons suitable for garden use were discovered in the mountains of southeastern Asia. The plant riches of the Orient came in to the sponsors of the expeditions in such floods that greenhouse benches filled with tiny rhododendrons grown from the explorers' seeds were shoveled out to make room for later arrivals thought to be even more promising.

But, the near-total eclipse of the tropical Malaysians came with the economic disruptions of the First World War. The vaulted conservatories, vast ranges of greenhouses, the labor and the heat used for their cultivation became too luxurious for even the very rich.

The interval between the two world wars produced a strange chapter in that sometime science, botany. For the best part of a human generation, a third of the planets rhododendrons were ignored as if they did not exist. The taxonomists hunched over their herbarium sheets of temperate Mainland rhododendrons at Edinburgh and Harvard, in Paris and Berlin, New York and Stockholm. In all the world only Dr." Herman Sleumer at the Rijksherbarium in Leiden continued a systematic study of the tropical Malaysians.

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