Yunnan - Land of the Southern Cloud (1)

11 comments

In mid May, I flew off to Yunnan in southwest China for another botanising holiday. We started in the west of the province where three rivers, the Salween, the Mekong, and the Yangtze, run parallel to each other in deep valleys with heavily wooded, steep sides. Although there is a huge project to improve the infrastructure within China, we were in a remote part of the country without multi-lane highways. But we travelled in style

Our first meal was breakfast at a small guesthouse (or homestay as they are known) near Tengchong airport

We were able to watch the meal being prepared

Then it was on to look at plants. The first shrub we saw in flower was viburnum erubescens

Nearby, the epiphytic orchid dendrobium thyrsiflorum adorned the trees

Barking dogs attracted us to a beekeeper’s hut in the wood. The dogs were to deter local bears from stealing the honey!

We saw several arisaemas on the trip. This is a family of plants that needs the botanists to sort it out as many have not been properly identified. This one is probably arisaema wilsonii

A couple of our group spent part of their lives in the Far East, and one of them tracked down the old British consulate in Tengchong. The building dates to around 1930 when all goods coming into China from Burma came through this town

A spectacular bulb from this area is cardiocrinum giganteum var yunnanense. Stems can reach nine feet or more

Melastoma malabathricum, sometimes known as the Indian rhododendron, is a non-hardy shrub we saw on the edge of woodland

There was very little in flower in the woods, but where there were breaks in the canopy, iris japonica formed large clumps

We drove on up the Salween Valley, but even here we encountered roadworks

We discovered more shrubs in flower, deutzia longifolia

And pieris formosa

So far, the weather had been good

To be continued ….

• 31 Jul, 2017
• 19 likes

More blog posts by AndrewR