Heights terrified him and he hated the cold. Yet Frank Kingdon Ward was irresistibly drawn to the peaks and passes of the Himalayas. Indeed, he spent nearly his entire adult life amid those mountains and their subsidiary ranges. Unless he was in the Burmese uplands, dodging the snakes that he also abhorred.
Clearly, Kingdon Ward was a man of contradictions. Born in 1885, he was as reserved as one expected a Victorian Englishman to be, a shy man and a loner who nevertheless made a habit of proposing marriage to casual acquaintances (he did this on at least three occasions, though he later claimed that his brief engagement to the daughter of a Tibetan village headman was a simple misunderstanding). More important, Kingdon Ward was the premier plant hunter of his time, and he transformed the twentieth-century garden with the species he brought back from his twenty-four expeditions into the wilds. Rhododendrons, for example, owe much of their prestige as garden plants to him, for he introduced into cultivation hundreds of new species and varieties of this shrub. Nor were his achievements limited to woody plants. He provided us with many of our choicest primulas and lilies, and his single most famous coup was to bring back the first seed of the legendary Tibetan blue poppy (Meconopsis betonicifolia). That plant caused something like mass hysteria when its broad and silken iridescent sky-blue blossoms were first exhibited at the Royal Horticultural Society’s summer show of 1926.
However, Kingdon Ward himself disdained this horticultural success. He regarded plant collecting as an expedient, a means of paying for his serious work as a geographical explorer. He held to this position all his life, despite the fact that as an explorer, he never truly reached the first rank. He was respected for his achievements in this field. His observations filled in blank spaces in the map of central and southeast Asia, and he won gold medals from both the Royal Geographical Society and the Scottish Royal Geographical Society. Yet his geographical discoveries never won him anything like the fame of his horticultural ones. On one occasion only did he almost make the leap. In 1924 he set out to verify local rumors of a great falls on Tibet’s Tsangpo River. After a heroic journey down the Tsangpo’s precipitous gorge, Kingdon Ward abandoned the quest—having reached, it later emerged, a point just a quarter mile short of his goal.*
For the gardeners of today, even those who garden only from an armchair, Kingdon Ward’s most rewarding inconsistency was his simultaneous aversion and commitment to communication. He was, according to all who knew him, an extraordinarily taciturn man. Heartfelt testimony concerning this came from the series of wealthy young aristocrats whose financial contributions bought them spots on Kingdon Ward’s expeditions. They all agreed later that they received more than their money’s worth of adventure, in that era when travel was by foot, tweed was the miracle fiber, and food was limited to what you could shoot or what you could buy with silver bullion from the impoverished mountain villages. Kingdon Ward shocked these gently reared young men with his diet of hairy yak butter tea, barley-flour chapattis, and rice, with the occasional relish of a boiled egg or curried cockerel. As slender as these helpings were, however, even more meager was the ration of conversation he served to his companions. Ronald Kaulback, who accompanied Kingdon Ward on a 1933 trek through Assam, later recalled:
He was, to start with at any rate, until I got to know him, a very, very difficult man to travel with, simply because he could so easily fall into total silence, which would last for two or three days. Not a damn thing. He might say “Good Morning,” otherwise he would just march along, and at the end of the day sit down and have a meal, but nothing, not a word.
It would be a bit awkward.
This tight-lipped demeanor, however, did not mean that Kingdon Ward had nothing to say. He might not have a word for camp-mates, but much of the time he was not on the trail he was writing compulsively. He filled journals with observations, not just about plants, altitudes, and solar fixes of longitude and latitude, but also about people, feelings, fears, hopes, the beauties of the passing scene, and the details of daily life in camp and on the trail. He sent a stream of letters and articles back to England, mailing off bundles of correspondence whenever he came near a town, and when he finished a trip, he nearly always marked its completion with a book. In this fashion, twenty-four expeditions spawned twenty volumes of reminiscences (as well as five monographs on natural history and gardening techniques).
Together, Kingdon Ward’s recollections present a priceless portrait of a time and place, of the Himalayas as yet unharmed by clear-cutting, strip-mining, and Chinese cultural genocide. At the same time, Kingdon Ward’s unsentimental, wryly self-deprecating narrative offers the single best introduction to the life and craft of the professional plant collector, a story of high adventure and of the man who was, despite himself, one of the giants of modern gardening.
Kingdon Ward’s books were popular in their time (though not very profitable for the author—his publisher, for example, paid an advance of just £30 for his 1923 opus, Mystery Rivers of Tibet, and only after deducting from this princely sum £3. 6d. for “expenses”). Today, though, these works are largely forgotten. If remembered at all, they are generally treated as a sort of Kipling with a green thumb, uncomfortable relics of an imperialism that is now so profoundly unfashionable.
This is unfair. Kingdon Ward was a loyal and, for the most part, unquestioning servant of the empire. He had little choice. His father, a self-made university professor, had worked himself to death by the age of fifty-eight, leaving his family at the edge of poverty. Frank, then a second-year student at Cambridge, had to terminate his studies in natural science and do as so many other young Englishmen of his class did: He went east to the colonies in search of the opportunities denied to him at home. To pay his passage, he took a job as a teacher at a sort of ersatz “public school,” a sort of colonial Eton, in Shanghai. To his credit, Kingdon Ward found uncongenial the task of flogging anglophilia into the sons of expatriate businessmen and wealthy Chinese. When, after two years in the classroom, a friend of his father recommended Frank for a spot on a zoological expedition bound to western China, the young man never hesitated.
His contribution to the work of the expedition was modest. He collected two species of voles previously unknown to science, and made a small collection of plant specimens, which he sent back to the School of Botany in Cambridge. Far more important was his demonstration of resilience and resourcefulness. When the expedition reached the Tibetan frontier, the young Kingdon Ward wandered away from the main party (this, too, would prove a habit) and was lost in the snows for two days with only a crust of bread for provisions. Despite an encounter with hostile locals and with a flock of vultures tearing apart the corpse of a baby, he didn’t lose his head. By tucking himself into crevices in the rocks, he survived the chilly nights and eventually found his way back to safety undamaged.
Kingdon Ward returned to Shanghai with the beginnings of a reputation, and this was sufficient to bring offers for employment from wealthy gardeners. Anxious to acquire the horticultural treasure of the last unexplored temperate wilderness, these men needed someone of Kingdon Ward’s talents. These were, in fact, to prove exceptional. To begin with, even as a novice, he had an eagle’s eye for promising plants. Comrades on subsequent trips wrote of arriving exhausted at some stopping place at day’s end; after setting up the tent, they collapsed on the ground while the cook made dinner. Meanwhile, Kingdon Ward would vanish, reappearing a couple of hours later with some plant he had spotted on a distant hillside en route.
His appetite for botanical and horticultural specimens was insatiable. His very first solo expedition in 1911 brought a harvest of seeds and tubers of two hundred species of plants, twenty-two of which were previously undiscovered. With experience, he was able to double, triple, or even quintuple this bag on later trips. Moreover, in addition to starts of garden plants, Kingdon Ward continued to collect for science, pressing and drying specimens for various herbaria in Britain and the United States. Taking the live and pressed specimens together, Kingdon Ward logged an astonishing total of some twenty-three thousand collections in the course of his career. This diligence was another sore point with the paying companions. Lord Cawdor, long-legged heir to a Scottish earldom who accompanied Kingdon Ward on the exploration of the Tsangpo gorges, confided to his diary:
It drives me clean daft to walk behind him—Stopping every 10 yards and hardly moving in between—In the whole of my life I’ve never seen such an incredibly slow mover—If ever I travel again I’ll make damned sure it’s not with a botanist. They are always stopping to gape at weeds.
What was most remarkable about Kingdon Ward’s collections, though, was not the quantity but the quality. Unlike the other collectors of his day, he had an instinctive understanding of ecology. Early on in his career, he proposed tracing the climatic and geologic history of the Himalayan region through a study of the distribution of plant species and the relative diversity of chosen genera in different areas. On a more pragmatic level, he applied this ecological insight to his selection of plants to bring home for cultivation. There were, for example, several species of blue poppies in Tibet; of Meconopsis betonicifolia, the one whose seed he collected, he wrote:
Never have I seen a blue poppy which held out such high hopes of being hardy, and of easy cultivation in Britain. Being a woodland plant it will suffer less from the tricks of our uncertain climate; coming from a moderate elevation, it is accustomed to that featureless average of weather which we know so well how to provide it with.
Because Kingdon Ward worked in remote areas far from any road, he typically could not collect whole plants and expect them to survive the trip back to England. Seed was more durable and, of course, far less bulky. But the need for seed creates a paradox that has plagued plant collectors of all eras. A plant most clearly states its potential as a garden subject when it is in bloom; but when in flower, a plant rarely offers ripe and collectable seed. Kingdon Ward coped with this dilemma by making, whenever he could, two sweeps through each area, one at the height of the flowering season and another weeks or months later when he knew that most plants would have gone to seed. Success in this style of collecting depended on his uncanny ability to relocate individual plants after seeing them just once. On at least one occasion, when he returned to find an area buried under several feet of snow, Kingdon Ward was able to dig down and expose the very specimen he had spotted during his previous visit.
Fundamentally, every gardener is a plant collector, though most of us venture no farther on our expeditions than a nearby nursery or a friend’s garden. For this reason, Kingdon Ward’s memoirs are sure to connect with anyone who has ever hefted a spade. Yet even for those who (inexplicably) have never felt the urge to plant a garden, these books make fascinating reading.
Anyone who has ever felt dizzy at the edge of a precipice will shudder with Kingdon Ward as he swings across yet another bottomless gorge on a cable of twisted bamboo strands. His unsentimental pleasure in the people he encounters along the ways—“it was good to smell the sour, rancid smell of a Tibetan again”; his lip-smacking (if suitably discreet) descriptions of the beautiful native women; these passages make us wish we could have been there with him. He had a knack for capturing the vast Himalayan panoramas, the smells of breakfast in camp, the horror of battling leeches in the rain-soaked montane forests. He chilled with the casual tone in which he describes constant brushes with death, from fever, avalanche, and cold.
Most seductive is his growing rapport with the landscapes and their inhabitants. What began as an expedient gradually becomes Kingdon Ward’s true home. He came east with the standard racism of the colonial and to the end of his life he was very conscious of the distinction between them and us. However, this didn’t stop him from admiring the uncomplaining sturdiness of the hill people and their rapport with their environment. As their environment became his environment, Kingdon Ward gradually achieved the kind of direct, uncomplicated communication with the local people that he never had with a Kaulback or Cawdor. When trouble blew up with his native employees or assistants, and on one occasion this included repeated assaults by a knife-wielding Tibetan, Kingdon Ward was not afraid to step down off the imperial pedestal. He’d jump in and settle the disagreement with his fists. This negotiating technique seems to have suited all parties, for it typically ended in tearful vows of renewed brotherhood.
It was as well that Kingdon Ward could step outside the standard colonial mold, for this supposed Kipling outlived the empire. His last half-dozen expeditions were made after World War II. India, Burma, and Pakistan had regained their independence, and China, reuniting under the Communist party, was reasserting itself in Tibet. Kingdon Ward’s last venture into the northern Burmese hinterlands, in 1953, was possible only because the Burmese government wanted him to train two of its own as field botanists. Kingdon Ward’s relations with these young men were often testy. Age (he was by now sixty-eight years old and feeling keenly the physical demands of trekking) had not made Kingdon Ward any more sociable. He was deeply touched, though, by the memorial that one of the Burmese botanists, Chit Ko Ko, carved into the trunk of an aralia:
To F. Kingdon-Ward, who knew and loved North Burma
Certainly, that was a fitting epitaph for this remarkable man. Though in point of fact, Kingdon Ward did not die in his beloved hills. He survived all the terrifying heights, the blizzards, even a 1950 earthquake in Assam that measured 8.6 on the Richter scale. On that last occasion, he passed a night with the ground tossing like a stormy sea and the air filled with the booms of rupturing rock; the next morning, Kingdon Ward found that the altitude of his camp had shot up two hundred feet. He, meanwhile, suffered not a scratch. It was eight years later, back in England, on home leave with his second wife (as stalwart a collector as he), that Kingdon Ward was struck down by a stroke in a London pub.
Frank Kingdon Ward is buried in a Cambridgeshire churchyard. His body is there in the English earth, just as his talent—his eye for a plant and his relentless dedication to the hunt—is in our gardens. His heart, however, surely remains in the East. As he wrote in his diary, upon a return to Tibet in 1935:
Sometimes I have almost wept for joy at the sight of the jungle, green and serene, the softly undulating water, smooth hills flaring out the distant plains. Now I greet the snow-covered hills and the dark coniferous forest with the same joy.
——
TOM CHRISTOPHER is a professional horticulturist trained at the New York Botanical Garden and the author of the “One Gardener’s Almanac” column in House & Garden magazine. He lives in Middletown, Connecticut.
*In fairness, it must be said that it was another seventy years before anyone other than Tibetan nomads would see the falls, and that when, with the aid of motorized transportation and modern mountaineering equipment, a National Geographic expedition led by an American named Ian Baker reached them in 1998, the achievement was considered worthy of headlines and a television special.