Issue: 1135 Date: 5/24/2012
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Garden partnership brings forth the 'Flora of China'
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Visitors to Missouri Botanical Garden these days are greeted by an enormous yellow dragon lantern that stretches down the entrance to Ridgway Visitor Center. It is easy to deduce that this creature is part of the upcoming Lantern Festival to be launched Memorial Day weekend.
Thoughtful and/or frequent visitors may remember that this year's orchid show had a Chinese theme, and that the Brookings Interpretive Center features an interactive exhibit on Chinese culture. Why the emphasis on China?
The garden's Year of China is celebrating the imminent completion of a monumental scholarly achievement: the 45-volume "Flora of China." This detailed description of each of the approximately 31,500 vascular plants that grow wild in China has great botanical value.
China is extremely rich in flora diversity; in an area approximately the size of the United States, it has 1.5 times the number of species of the U.S. and Canada combined. And just about half of these species grow nowhere else in the world. About 5,000 of these species are used in traditional Chinese medicine. The information in these volumes will be used to conserve biodiversity, investigate new sources for food and medicine, and understand evolution.
