Hyperbole Most Florid - Farrer & Purdom

Reginald Farrer

There’s something rather reminiscent of Monty Python in the writings of the intrepid ‘plant hunter’, Reginald Farrer – the elevated absurdity of hunting flowers, as he describes it, always gets me grinning with glee:

“As I drew near my anxiety and the beating of my heart grew almost painful. Despair seized me when I remembered previous failures, the open situation, the devastating hailstorms of these later days. Panting I at last scrambled up beneath the cliff, and ascended to the neck where, among the moss and tiny Rhododendrons, the Primula had dappled that whole saddle with sparks of blue fire. And now, of those hundreds of flowers, there survived only some three or four capsules, standing grim and lonely on their elongated stalks above the minute scrub. And every one of them was white and empty as an ancient skull. I cursed the plant’s exaggerated and giraffe-like throat, that prevents more than about one per cent. of the blossoms from setting seed. Then in my gloom I turned to climb down again, wanly remembering a certain long ledge of rock on the cliff-face below where there had been some fine specimens. Was it worth while to have a look on chance of seed remaining? Capsules, indeed, I soon saw from afar, four or five of them standing sturdily up in a line under the boulder. Empty, of course. I hardly cared or dared go nearer. At a second glance, however, I stood stricken, stock-still, and almost afraid to breathe; for there in the cup of each, discapsuled, loose, and at the mercy of a moment’s flaw of wind, there still lay seed. Pavid and incredulous I crept nearer with utmost caution, moving with Agag-like delicacy for fear I might shake the mountain, and spreading myself out as wide as possible to intercept the breeze. I reached the pods, and with agonised firm precision I nipped them off between finger and thumb, in anguish lest a single grain should drop; and so, with sweat upon my brow, and a great sigh heaved, I pocketed up the Grand-Violet in a special pouch, and relapsed into the ecstasy of achievement.”

There’s also something very Proustian in his style of writing too. Farrer’s circuitous prose ambulates from one idle or acid philosophical reflection to another. Gossiping about the personality traits of flowers. His florid and lyrical sentences seem to wander, and his books are peppered with whimsical, wry and witty observations – rather like Jerome K. Jerome. Little surprise then that Farrer was a self-confessed fan of Jane Austen. His books and articles combine a mix of horticultural treatise with travelogues of his journeys through Asia or the mountain regions of Europe. They were immensely popular in their time. Yet reading them now I can’t help but hear them narrated in the comic voice of Michael Palin and his ‘Ripping Yarns’. There’s an almost pooterish mix of the tediously mundane with the genuinely intrepid in his writings – travelling through regions haunted by bandits and brigands in search of the most fragile of little flowers – all of which is deftly enlivened by the sheer panache of his most purple prose. Reading On the Eaves of the World, for instance, can be quite a giggle.

Farrer was a Yorkshireman born in 1880 in Marylebone, London to a well-to-do family, related to the Sitwells. He grew up in Ingleborough, the family home, in Clapham in the North Riding of Yorkshire, where he nurtured an early interest in the local flora of the surrounding limestone hills. Aged fourteen he redesigned the estate’s alpine garden and published a note on the local endemic sandwort, Arenaria gothica. He had a harelip (which he later obscured under a handsome waxed moustache) and possibly a cleft palate, which meant he spent much of his childhood undergoing operations and medical treatments. Hence in his early years he was schooled at home, but later on he followed in the family tradition, studying at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1902. 

Euan H. M. Cox (Glendoick)

Travel became another of his main passions. In the year after he left Oxford he embarked on a long tour of Asia, visiting Peking (Beijing), passing briefly through Korea, before spending eight months in Japan, where the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says he “had an affair with a geisha girl.” His first book was an evocative account of this trip, The Garden of Asia, published in 1904. He was a frequent traveller with friends to the Alps and Dolomites, always interested in collecting alpine plants and writing about rock gardening. In 1908 he travelled to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), a trip which deepened his spiritual interest in Buddhism, a religion which he openly adopted as his own. He dabbled for a while in politics too, before deciding to pursue a career as a full time plant collector. Spending two years travelling through the borderlands of the “Chinese Alps of Tibet” from 1914-1916 with William Purdom, and returning in 1919 to the borderlands of West China and Burma with Euan H. M. Cox, who later wrote the first comprehensive history of plant hunters in the region. Farrer wrote about these journeys in On the Eaves of the World (1917) and The Rainbow Bridge (1921), the latter work being posthumously published, as he died at the early age of 40 whilst travelling in the China-Burma borderlands.

Also born in 1880, William Purdom was a professionally trained plant hunter. He began his botanical career working for the nurseries of Low & Sons in Enfield, and later for Veitch & Sons, before joining the staff and continuing his studies with the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. In 1909 he was recruited by the Arnold Arboretum, attached to Harvard University in the USA, and sent to China. Purdom’s 1909-1912 expedition to the Kansu region was not as productive as had been hoped, largely due to the local difficulties Purdom encountered in the form of ‘brigandage’ and political unrest. So Purdom joined forces with Farrer in 1914. Describing Purdom as “an excellent traveller”, Euan Cox thought “he was always shy and retiring, quite overshadowed by Farrer’s personality. Purdom, however, was a perfect companion who knew Chinese well and was much liked by them in return.” As with Ernest Henry Wilson, Purdom’s interests were not simply limited to botany, he also showed a keen and perceptive interest in anthropology. Like Wilson, he was also highly adept with a glass-plate camera, particularly portraiture. By this means he created a rich ethnographic record of the communities he encountered in the borderlands and many of these images have been preserved in the Arnold Arboretum archives (see here). After completing Farrer’s expedition in 1916 Purdom joined the Chinese Forestry Service where he became a division chief, supervising a system of tree planting as part of the construction of the Chinese Railway system. He too died young, passing away at the French hospital in Peking (Beijing) after a short illness in November 1921, just over a year after his friend, Farrer.

Bill Purdom disguised as a Chinese 'Coolie' in order to secretly collect plants on a sacred mountain, where he was mistaken for a brigand

Purdom published little, so it is harder to gauge a sense of what he was like, but we get glimpses of the man in other writer’s descriptions, such as that given above by Cox. Farrer makes frequent mention of him in On the Eaves of the World, but again these descriptions often tend to be short – yet they give fleeting hints as to his personality. For instance, when Purdom and Farrer were invited to a lavish banquet hosted by a local Chinese dignitary, Farrer quips: “Dear Purdom, whose facility in getting on with the Chinese is only equalled by his depression before any prospect of having to do so, manifested no enthusiasm on the occasion; but for me my first Chinese feast was a matter of some excitement and flutter.” 

It seems Purdom was well respected amongst his peers. Opinions on Farrer were rather more qualified. Frank Kingdon Ward noted his shortcomings, but also had praise for Farrer too, saying: “He had a wonderful eye for a good plant, and an almost uncanny knowledge of how to preserve seed. His specimens were always beautifully preserved and described, his seeds always germinated. As an all-round plant collector he probably had no equal.” Euan Cox, who accompanied Farrer on his second and final expedition to China, agreed with Kingdon Ward but also noted somewhat more critically that: “His prowess as a plant introducer more than outweighed his care as a botanical collector, for he abhorred weeds, and would not collect herbarium material unless he proposed collecting the seed of the plant afterwards. Thus from a botanical standpoint, where everything in a strange land is worthy of inclusion in the vasculum, he was slipshod in his methods. This is proved by the fact that during his two expeditions, one through an extremely rich area, he only collected about 1,920 specimens.”

Much like fellow botanist, Joseph Rock, Farrer often liked to dress up in flamboyant Chinese costume

Frank Kingdon Ward

Farrer’s lack of scientific rigour was something Frank Kingdon Ward lamented also, but Farrer himself was quite open about his lack of interest and aptitude in this area of exploration. In writing about his preparations before an expedition he stated that: “The mind of a Napoleon is required to weigh up accurately beforehand all that is essential and all that is omissible in a voyage of two seasons; to my own thinking, almost everything is omissible once one makes up one’s mind to it, and it is wonderful how simple life can become when resolutely resolved into its bare essentials. In my own case, I find it reduces itself to the materials of washing and the works of Jane Austen; of the two, at extreme need, it would be the washing materials that I would jettison. As for scientific implements such as one considers necessary to the dignity of such an expedition to the Back of Beyond, I believe they are a delusion and a fraud, and in the hands of the ignorant as useful and profitable as a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout – and much less so than a fair woman without discretion. Fain I would take plane-tables and theodolites and all the learned apparatus of modern black magic. But even an aneroid is beyond my control at present, and inspires me with nothing but the blackest distrust. So far as I have observed these instruments in action, you twist the face round till the pointer marks the height you think you ought to be at, and then you triumphantly say, ‘There you are!’” Despite this, rather tongue in cheek debunking of the modern methodologies of scientific exploration, Farrer was on the cusp of being elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society at the time of his death.

Words may have been more his forte than surveying. This was something which both Cox and Kingdon Ward were agreed upon. Cox esteemed Farrer’s use of language as magical: “… the writings of Reginald Farrer [managed] to titillate the imagination of budding gardeners and to weave a kind of spell over the whole process of plant collecting in the East.” Kingdon Ward similarly found a virtue in his faults: “[Farrer] wrote a great deal, and though he was guilty of hyperbole and extravagant language, though he paid scant heed to the formulae of Chinese nomenclature, or to the exact requirements of latitude and longitude, yet he succeeded in drawing attention to an aspect of geography too often neglected – the sheer beauty of scenery and the refining influence of vegetation on it.”

Vide: – Farrer giving a lyrical vignette of his travels: “Steeply the little woodcutters’ track now mounts on the coppiced hillside, where tall Lady-slippers of buttery-yellow compete with swollen cousins whose petals are striped with vinous purple, and whose enormous rounded bag is of richest crimson maroon. One winds upwards thence to the alpine woodland, deep between vast pinnacle mountains of limestone, mere prickles on the flanks of the Min S’an ridge, but clothed with cool forest in a fashion very heartening after the drought and torridness of the valley regions and the lower gorges. The path, almost unguessable now, wanders through the woodland in the shade, in and out of the stream-bed. Beneath the shade of the trees, in the solemn stillness, the Wood-nymph Primula recurs, amid strange Solomon’ seals, and Arums with fantastic tails and spotted evil faces.” – Reading lines like these it’s almost as if Farrer has wandered the length of the Guermantes Way and kept going, wandering all the way to Asia!

Farrer might not have been as rigorously scientific as his contemporaries nor as systematic in his methods, such as collectors like Wilson, Forrest, and Kingdon Ward, or Sheriff and Ludlow were, but he could be just as perceptive and even prescient. Noting the local environmental depredations of one particular region with a long eye to the future – much like Ernest Henry Wilson and Jean Kingdon Ward both observed in their later writings – for instance (this quote also contains one of my most favourite typos to make it into print): “The next day we left Tao Hor, saying good-bye to it forever, and cut across the angle to the right, up into a land of undistinguishable loess plains and bummocks [sic] and downs, perfectly barren and lifeless, uniformly dust-coloured, and as hideous as a slag-dump under a cold grey sky. It is hard to believe that these terrible regions of Northern Kansu can ever have had woodlands or life. Possibly they never did, though it is certain – that at one time the now-ruined country must have been much better watered and wooded in general. Nowadays, thanks to the destruction of every twig for ages past, Northern Kansu is as desert as Sahara, bleak and torn and hopeless except in the flat vales of its starveling stony rivers, where the means of livelihood are scratched and scraped into existence. But the desert gains each year, the verdant flats of Lanchow are encircled as far as eye can see in wrinkled dust-yellow ranges of stark lifelessness and in no time the cities along the great North Road to Russia, Liang-jô, Su-jô, Kan-jô, Hami, Urumtchi will be going the way of the lost civilisation of Khotan, swamped in the ocean of sand which is Central Asia.”

Whether Proustian or Python-esque, Reginald Farrer’s writings are genuinely entertaining romps which manage to transform plant hunting into something rather more sublime than the usual catalogue of staid old colonial tropes more commonly found in such contemporary travelogues, even if his books are still firmly rooted in that soil from which the myth of the lone white explorer first germinated. It’s easy to see why his writings had such popular appeal amongst the armchair explorers back home in Blighty. 

Yet inside he was a conflicted individual, seen by many of his contemporaries as crotchety and cantankerous. Writing to Osbert Sitwell from Burma in the year that he died Farrer summed up his own foibles thus: “I hate lies and humbug, journalism, Christianity, domesticity, dullness, and European civilisation in general with a fury that, if I let it, makes me feel quite ill.” All explorers, to varying degrees, by their very natures are outsiders, seeking an escape from the norm. What I find most interesting though is how such a singular character as Farrer’s diversifies the range of eccentric personalities which were all drawn to transcend the boundaries of their backgrounds, all seemingly seeking to lose themselves in these borderlands where they might perhaps have felt more at home or at ease within themselves. Farrer is one of the few who never made it back, and in a sense he remains an outsider to this day as he lies buried on a hillside in Burma, at a place called Kawngglanghpu. Yet he lives on through his many books, and also by means of the beautiful plants he collected so intrepidly which now grace so many English gardens; flowers so fully integrated into a cultivated and contrived English idyll as to be almost unseen, the backstories behind their foreign origins now sadly so little known. The foreign made familiar – I can’t help wondering if that fact might have made Farrer smile or curse were he to know it today?