Born in 1876 Ernest Henry Wilson was mostly raised in Shirley, Warwickshire, England. He took interest father’s work as a florist and left school early to be an apprentice gardener and would go on to study botany. By 23, Wilson was at Kew Gardens and was recruited to be a plant hunter with his first task being to search for the elusive Dove Tree Davidia involucrata in China. The tree had been spotted by earlier hunters, but none were ever collected for some reason. He reached China in 1899 with instructions to travel to Hunan Province to find a tree that had been spotted some years earlier. When he reached the spot he found it had been chopped down so he spent the next two years searching for another. Despite his trip back to the UK being interrupted by a shipwreck, he finally managed to get that tree specimen.
Wilson made many expeditions and they all seem to always involve some harrowing event. How much of it is exaggerated… or just kind of his fault is undetermined. On one of his journeys, he had his leg crushed in a landslide climbing a mountain. In some accounts, they leave out the part about how he wasn’t so much climbing the mountain as he was having other people climb the mountain while carrying him in a sedan chair. Not clear about what a sedan chair is? Check out my cool drawing to the right.
So anyway, it took like three days for whoever was left standing (he couldn’t have been the only one hurt) from the accident to carry him to a place that could deal with his injuries. Afterward, he walked with a limp, proudly calling it his “lily limp” since he’d collected many lilies including the Regal Lily on that trip.
In Tyler Whittle’s book The Plant Hunters he describes Wilson heroically, taking risks to get the precious plants. In one description Whittle recounts that during one excursion Wilson and the men assisting him traveled for some time in an unknown area and all were weak with starvation. Whittle said Wilson was under “constant threat of being abandoned” by his party. But it would make sense because most people when faced with hunger, being lost, and having some British dude demanding he ride shotgun on their shoulders all so he can look for flowers, would probably contemplate ditching him. It seems like a no-brainer but maybe that’s just me.
In any case, by 1909 he moved with his family to Boston because he became a plant hunter for the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard and made more plant-hunting expeditions on their behalf.
In all, Wilson introduced around 2000 Asian species to the West before he and his wife died in a car crash in Massachusetts in 1930. Some attribute the crash to his bum leg caused by his sedan chair adventure. Others say he just wasn’t accustomed to not being carried in a chair and forgot he had to steer the car wheel instead of barking directions at some poor guys carrying him… Okay, I made up the last part.
Images: Dove Tree. via Wikimedia Commons
Portrait of EHW. 1920.
Crayon Drawing 98201 Seed. Absolutely no rights reserved.
Whittle, Tyler The Plant Hunters. Philadelphia: Chilton Book Co. 1970.
Eliot Tozer, “On the trail of E.H. Wilson,” Horticulture, November 1994:59.
Kew Gardens. http://apps.kew.org/herbcat/gotoWilson.do Retrieved 2022-4-4
Musgrave, T.; Gardner, C. ; Musgrave, W. The Plant Hunters. Ward Lock Books, London. 224 p. 1998.