This book successfully combines a most enjoyable and detailed account of the well-known author's many journeys through China. Roy Lancaster follows in the footsteps of the great Victorian plant hunters and describes, in this, his magnum opus, some 1,000 different plants in their natural habitat. This is a book about plants from a country so rich in variety that there are 50 percent more species on one mountain in China than in the whole of the British Isles. Indeed, the wide range of climatic conditions in a country as vast as China makes this book relevant to gardeners everywhere.