(and later) was Frank Kingdon-Ward.

Kingdon-Ward was the son of Marshall Ward, P

rofessor of Botany at Cambridge from 1895 to 1906, but was himself more of a geo
grapher
than a botanist. However, he made numerous expeditions to eastern Asia, which he
subsidised by collecting plants and seeds. He covered a wider area than Forrest
, collecting in
eastern India, western Xizang, and subtropical Burma as well as in southwestern
China.
He collected a considerable number of rhododendrons, both as herbarium specimens
and as seed. His collections are not so well organised as Forrest s: for many seed
numbers
there is no equivalent herbarium specimen (either in flower or in fruit), so it
is not possible to compare living plants with his original material. Nonetheless
, Kingdon-Ward
visited areas not touched by other collectors, and his plants are extremely impo
rtant. He
made his last expedition (to Burma) in 1953. He wrote many books on his travels,
and
these were extremely popular. They contain much helpful information on the rhodo
dendrons he collected. For further details of Kingdon-Ward s life and expeditions,
see
Schweinfurth and Schweinfurth-Marby (1975).
The 3rd really important rhododendron collector operating in southwestern China
in the first half of the 20th century was Joseph Rock. Rock was an American of V
iennese
origin, a polymath whose interests included botany, zoology, anthropology, langu
ages,
and photography. He collected a large number of artefacts of all kinds, as well
as botanical and zoological specimens. For a considerable period he had a house
in Lijiang in
Yunnan, and collected widely in Yunnan, Sichuan, and further north in Hubei. Lik
e Forrest, Rock tried to collect suites of specimens (seed, herbarium specimens
in flower and
in fruit) linked by cross-referenced numbers, but he was not as consistent as Fo
rrest in
this. In 1949 Rock had to leave Yunnan for Burma, travelling ahead of Mao Tse-tu
ng s
Red Army; while retreating, he continued to collect specimens and seed. His herb
arium specimens, at least of Rhododendron, ended up in Edinburgh, and the seed h
e collected was distributed mainly by the U.S. Department of Agriculture; much o
f it arrived
in Britain and was grown on.
The only Chinese collector of rhododendrons well known in Britain was T. T. Y. Y
made extensive collections of rhododendrons in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Xizang in th
e
1930s; in order to identify them he had to bring them to Edinburgh to compare th
em
with the material being worked on by Balfour s successors (particularly Sir Willia
m
Wright Smith). At the outbreak of the Second World War, Y had to return to China,
but
a duplicate set of his collections was left in Edinburgh for further study. This
included
some seed, which was, of course, grown on.
Forrest, Kingdon-Ward, Rock, and Y were the main collectors of what is now
thought of as the classic period of rhododendron collection in China, but there
were
others who collected in areas more marginal to the extremely rich Yunnan-Sichuan
area.
Such areas clearly had fewer species, but those that were found were usually dif
ferent
16 Introductionfrom those from Yunnan and Sichuan. Notable among these collector
s are E. H. Wilson, who collected in northern Sichuan and Hubei (see Wilson 1913
), and Reginald Farrer, who collected in Burma and in areas of Hubei and Gansu (
see Cox 1933). Also of
minor importance for rhododendrons were the German collectors Heinrich HandelMaz
zetti and Camillo Karl Schneider, both of whom did some co-collecting with Forre
st.
Lists of field notes from the classic collections were published privately durin
g the
1930s, and lists of collectors numbers continued to be published in the various e
ditions
of The Rhododendron Handbook (1947 and later).
During the classic period in China, collecting also continued in the Himalaya an
d
western Xizang. Most notable among these collectors were Frank Ludlow and Charle
s
Sherriff, as well as their co-collectors, George Taylor, H. Elliott, and G. H. H
icks. Between
1933 and 1949 they collected in Bhutan, southwestern Xizang, Kashmir, and Sikkim
.
They again collected both seed and herbarium specimens, but not in the highly co
ordinated suites of Forrest s collections. Their herbarium specimens were returned
to the
Natural History Museum in London, where Ludlow was a staff member, with a duplic
ate
set to Edinburgh; seed was sent directly to Edinburgh and was distributed from t
here to
other gardens. More information on these collectors and their collections can be
found
in Fletcher (1975). Other collectors working in the Himalayan area were R. E. Co
oper,
Curator at the Edinburgh garden between 1934 and 1950, and G. E. Cave of the Cal
cutta
Botanic Garden.
Because of the activities of all these collectors, an enormous amount of new rho
dodendron material arrived in Edinburgh, mainly in the form of herbarium specime
ns but
also as seed which grew into living plants. The job of classifying and describin
g all this
new material fell to Isaac Bayley Balfour, who, as previously mentioned, was Reg
ius
Keeper at Edinburgh. With this new material, Balfour and his co-workers, includi
ng
Forrest, Kingdon-Ward, and Farrer, as well as other herbarium staff members at E
dinburgh such as William Wright Smith (who succeeded Balfour as Regius Keeper),
H. F.
Tagg, and W. E. Evans, were presented with a number of problems. What of it repr
esented new species, hitherto unknown? What of it was already known and describe
d?
How should the species, once described, be grouped so that new ones could be qui
ckly
placed with those they most resembled? It was necessary that these problems be d
ealt
with quickly, as botanists and gardeners (particularly those interested in hybri
disation)
were anxious to have names and descriptions for all the plants. Most of the taxo
nomic
work was done on the basis of the herbarium specimens accumulated at Edinburgh a
nd
elsewhere. For more on the importance of such specimens, see Cullen (1996).
In an amazing series of papers, published between 1916 and 1921, Balfour
described 320 new species of Rhododendron. The amount of work and study behind t
his
publication (which amounts to 460 pages) is truly phenomenal and shows Balfour s