国家地理-2008-06-21 China's Amazing Flowers 繁花似锦的中国

China has more plants than anywhere else in the temperate 1 regions of the world. In fact, it has almost twice as many kinds of plants as there are in the United States which is about the same size and about three times as many as there are in Europe. It’s a very wonderful wealth of plant species, many of which have contributed to our gardens, like rhododendrons, and azaleas, and forsythias,  to our cultivated plants like soybeans.

 The reason that there’re so many plants in China is that they've survived there better. If you go back fifteen million years into the past, you find much the same kinds of plants and the animals in the United States, Europe and China. They've survived in the warm temperate to subtropical forests that stretch right across the middle of China.

 In those forests of China we have surviving species like gingko, the maidenhair tree which has been in cultivation 2 in Europe and North America since the 17th century. A wonderful relic 3 in those forests is the dove tree, Davidia. It’s called the dove tree because the fluttering bracts that hang down from the clusters of  flowers look like doves flying.

 Another example is the dawn red wood, metasequoia, which was described as a fossil in 1941. Forty million years ago, it was the commonest forest tree in Western North America, now it’s completely wiped out there, but it survives as about 6,000 individuals in China.

 The western half of China in the interior of Asia consists of very tough deserts. In the harsh landscape of Tibet there exist a whole series of herbs, sedges, grasses, saussurea, primroses 5 that are found only there. Some groups of plants, like sorseria for example, have their buds protected against the low temperatures, they keep on growing.

 Another reason that there’re so many kinds of plants in China is that unlike the United States or Europe, there’s real tropical forest in the south tropical rain forests in southern Yunnan, and in that tropical forest, there are many species that come up from the south. They give the province of Yunnan about as many  species, one state of China, and in fact about as many species as there are in the United States and Canada combined, about 15,000 kinds of plants. And it’s the melding of all of those regions, the survival of species from the past and the creation of many new species by the forces in evolution and the diverse topography of China that’s produced so much variety, so wonderfully pleasing and exciting to see.

China is doing the best that it can to save its biological diversity including its floral heritage. Chinese officials are very concerned with this, but it’s very difficult to meet the needs of 1.3 billion people to allow them to consume more, to give them things that they want like automobiles 6 and other imports from the west and still to preserve the natural landscape or even the quality of the air, the water. They’re fighting that battle, a battle with which we are all familiar well, but they're going to have to do a great deal more in the future as we all are.

 Notes:

rhododendron: Any of numerous usually evergreen 7 ornamental 8 shrubs 9 of the genusRhododendron  of the North Temperate Zone, having clusters of variously colored, often bell-shaped flowers.

azaleas rhododendron: Any of various shrubs of the genusRhododendron  having showy, variously colored flowers.

forsythias: Any of several shrubs of the genusForsythia,  native to Asia and widely cultivated for their early-blooming yellow flowers.

maidenhair tree : =gingko.
dove tree: The Dove tree (Davidia involucrata) is a medium-sized deciduous 10 tree, usually placed in the tupelo family (Nyssaceae), but is sometimes included (with the tupelos) in the dogwood family (Cornaceae), and by yet others given family status of its own, as Davidiaceae. It is also known as the Handkerchief tree. The tree is native to central China, from Hubei to southern Gansu, south to Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan.
sedge: grass-like plant growing in marshes 11 or near water.
saussurea: Saussurea is a genus of about 300 species of flowering plants in the family Asteraceae, native to cool temperate and arctic regions of Asia, Europe, and North America, with the highest diversity in alpine 12 habitats in the Himalaya and central Asia.
primrose 4: Any of numerous plants of the genusPrimula,  having well-developed basal leaves and tubular, variously colored flowers grouped in umbels or heads with a funnel-shaped or salverlike corolla and a tube much longer than the calyx.
bract: A leaflike or scalelike plant part, usually small, sometimes showy or brightly colored, and located just below a flower, a flower stalk, or an inflorescence.