Francis Masson

Not always, obviously, with the light that we've got, but we still can showcase a lot of the plants, not all of them.

Like Francis Masson brought back aloes and pelargoniums and things like that that really need glasshouses and temperatures, and we can't obviously showcase those.

But what we can showcase, we showcase.

The Himalayan plants absolutely love the highland weather.

You can improve your husbandry by growing the plant if you know the conditions in the wild that it comes from, the soil, the heat, the cold.

that the altitude the humidity the light the shade can really improve your husbandry back home for a plant that perhaps you'd otherwise kill all the time because you don't know where it's from and how it grows in the wild but it just expands your knowledge obviously you might say you can see a type of red hot poker you've got in the garden such as nifofia linarifolia it's in flower now with lovely linear narrow leaves in full flower you know he introduced that you know who brought that back in the 1750s the first professional plant hunter in 1770 was a chap called francis masson from aberdeen in scotland that Joseph Banks, founding Kew Gardens to the Botanical Institute that it is known today, sent abroad to South Africa to bring back these plants.

As you say, risking life and limb, sometimes not coming back on these expeditions, often years in total.

That plant has a story that has to be told.