Dr. Bruce Bartholomew works on an international scientific project to document the biota of the Gaoligongshan, a very rainy mountain range forming the frontier between northeast Burma and northwest Yunnan Province of China. With its foothills in the mango altitudes, and its northern peaks topped with snow, the Gaoligongshan plays host to an enormous range of plants and animals. What’s more, it towers in a kind of ecological crossroads, where Himalayan and Tibetan influences interact with Indochinese, Indian and even northeast Asian elements. Major rivers flowing within a few hundred miles include the Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong and Yangtze.

A collaboration among the California Academy of Sciences and the Kunming Institutes of Botany and Zoology, the project includes sections on bryophytes and vascular plants, diatoms, arthropods, and vertebrates. Other participating organizations include the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the Institute of Zoology in Beijing, the Hunan Normal University, the Missouri Botanical Garden, Harvard University, the United States National Herbarium, and the Yunnan Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute. Dr. Bartholomew made it clear at the outset to our audience of gardening enthusiasts that his job involves killing plants in order to learn more about them, not growing them. But his slides left us in awe of what he’s been plucking off the slopes of Yunnan.

The region has 269 orchid species, 217 rosaceous species, 189 plants in the ericaceae, 101 plants in the coffee family, not to mention the 248 in asteraceae and the 178 grasses. What we gasped over included the pink late-winter-flowering tree Rhododendron protistum; hot-pink high-altitude melastomes like Oxyspora paniculata; blue-berried Simplococos lucida; wild Musa sp. at a mile above sea level; an aroid liana, Rhaphidophora decursiva at 2000 meters elevation; exquisite gentian-family perennials; a new Hydrangea species; the blowsy Luculia yunnanensis opening white from pink buds; an epiphytic Hedychium, and flowers of the 90-foot Gordonia longicarpa, a blooming seedling of which was on display at the front of the room. Other trees Dr. Bartholomew illustrated were the towering Chinese redwood relative, Taiwania cryptomerioides, Pinus yunnanensis and Lithocarpus species in this center of the genus’s diversity. From the local markets, he showed a dizzying assortment of edible mushrooms, and a rice (Zizania caudiciflora) used for its basal portion, not its seed. In the forest he found us an unusual species of kiwi, Actinidia callosa, also edible, if a bit small. The final slides documented a palm clinging to the marble walls of the gorge of the Salween River, Trachycarpus princeps, with silvery lower leaf surfaces, recently redocumented by Chen San Yang, Martin Gibbons, and Tobias Spanner. Dr. Bartholomew whetted our horticultural hungers for all the plants he showed us, but stated that he is prohibited from exporting propagules on his field visits.

According to Dr. Bartholomew, the curious commonalities of the floras of east Asia and eastern North America (which share close relations in the theaceae and taxodiaceae, for example) can be accounted for by the theory that before the ice ages, a nearly continuous belt of temperate-climate species connected the two regions, and was disrupted by glaciation, leaving its vestiges where the climate remained favorable. Another spot where affiliated species remain is in the Caucasus.

 

For more information about the Academy of Sciences’ work in the region, log on to http://research.calacademy.org/yunnan/.

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