Garden plants and their hunters – Countess Sarah Amherst

Countess Sarah Amherst was the wife of a Governor General of India, William Pitt Amherst, and one of the first botanists – of either gender – to explore the Himalayas. She’s probably best known for importing a bird, but she also brought back the seeds of Clematis montana and Anemone vitifolia in the 1830s.

Sadly, the Lady Amherst pheasant is about to become extinct in Britain, the first time a bird has been driven to extinction since 1840. It’s a gorgeous looking creature with an extremely long tail and a golden patch on its back, but now only one bird is thought to remain, in the northern Home Counties. Unless it can find a previously unsighted mate, and breeds successfully, it will be wiped out in the UK. Its gradual demise over the past decade is thought to be related to a steadily expanding fox population and culling by gamekeepers who believe they endanger fox hunts because they run rather than fly.

Despite having brought us one of the showiest of the clematis family, it’s a tree that bears the lady’s name. The Pride of Burma (Amherstia nobilis) is a tropical tree with exceptionally beautiful flowers, and although it’s heavily cultivated in gardens in the humid tropics – it is extremely rare in the wild and has only been collected in its native habitat three or four times. The extravagant flowers had down from a long inflorescence, or flower stalk, which is a bright crimson red at the end and each flower has five petals: two of these are minute and the rest are of unequal size.

Clematis Montana photograph by Rhian vK, used under a creative commons attribution licence

Plant Hunters