In an interview on Plant Hunting

The next one is Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges by Frank Kingdon Ward, edited by yourself.

This is one of a fairly tall pile of plant-hunting literature which came out from about 1850 to 1950. Frank Kingdon Ward wrote at least 20 books. The book covers his 1924-5 expedition to Southeast Tibet. It was probably his most daring and exciting trip and it contains the best descriptions of plants growing in the wild I can think of. It was out of print for about 60 years and if you were lucky enough to get your hands on a copy it was changing hands for £500. I and a couple of Americans spent 1995-1999 in this area retracing Kingdon Ward’s footsteps and going further. We republished this book illustrating everything that was in it in colour – the original only had a handful of black-and-white photos. Kingdon Ward died in the 1950s, but his second wife Jean Rasmussen is still alive and she attended the launch with his daughter and grandson.

When you went to Tibet, could you actually retrace his footsteps?

Yes, you could camp in the same campsites, take the same pictures, see the same trees – the book was that detailed and precise. We took some comparative photos and you could see the glaciers had retreated, but if you went to a particular spot in the campsite and Kingdon Ward said you’d find a particular plant there, you did find it. It’s probably the greatest plant-hunting book ever written. Most of the stuff he was finding was completely new. This is the book, for example, in which the blue poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia, was discovered.