In 1849 the British botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker travelled up the Lachen and Lachung valleys collecting plants. He was working for Kew Gardens, and rhododendrons were his main interest. Many of the species he found in these valleys were new to Western science.
Hooker sent seeds back to Britain, and his illustrated book on the rhododendrons of the Sikkim Himalaya helped start a fashion for the plants in British gardens. He also described the journey, the cold and the people of these valleys in his Himalayan Journals, published in 1854.
The trip ended badly. Hooker and his companion Archibald Campbell were detained by Sikkimese officials later that year, a quarrel that led the British to annex land in the south of Sikkim. Today the valleys he crossed are protected, and the Shingba Rhododendron Sanctuary around Yumthang keeps alive the forests that first drew him here.
Sources
- Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals (1854)
- Shingba Rhododendron Sanctuary (Wikipedia)
Legends are retold differently from village to village. Where a story is told locally rather than written down, we say so.
