I visited my maternal hometown, Yichang, Hubei, in the summer of 2023. Nestled along the banks of the Yangtze River, Yichang has long been a hinge between central and western China, a gateway to the rough terrains of the Three Gorges, and a threshold to Sichuan mountains and the broader Southwest frontier. One afternoon, I wandered into the newly rebuilt Yichang Museum. Inside a quiet archive room, I faced a wall of Western male portraits of missionaries, explorers, and naturalists, whose pursuits imprinted the mythic landscape with their presence and achievements.

Rifling through archival documents, I was compelled by Ernest Henry Wilson’s photographs of ruins, churches, and pagodas across the river valley. Months later in Minneapolis, as I pored over expedition reports and horticultural histories, his name surfaced again in Erik Mueggler’s The Paper Road. Here, Wilson appeared as a predecessor and inspiration to the plant hunters George Forrest and Joseph Rock, whose botanical expeditions charted the alpine worlds of Southwest China in the early twentieth century.¹

Wilson had walked through these very riverbanks a century before. He passed through the lands I would later study, which my family still inhabited, in pursuit of a tree: Davidia involucrata, the Dove Tree. That tree he found, or, rather, what he would later claim to have found, became the centrepiece of an enduring myth. What began as a horticultural mission in Ichang, Hupeh, as Wilson claimed, evolved into something else: a narrative of discovery, and the making of what I have come to understand as a “botanical elsewhere.”

Davidia involucrata had acquired an aura in late nineteenth-century horticultural circles well before Wilson arrived in China. The French missionary Armand David first described the tree in 1869 in Sichuan, southwest China. Two decades later, it was glimpsed in bloom by the British customs official and amateur botanist Augustine Henry while he was collecting specimens around the west of Yichang. Its large white bracts, hanging in pairs, fluttered like doves, or as Wilson would later write, like “snowflakes in spring.” Henry was enchanted, calling the species “worth any amount of money.” He dried specimens, sent notes to Kew Garden, and urged Veitch Nurseries in London to send a collector to acquire the tree.¹

Ernest Henry Wilson entered this landscape of desire. In 1899, the horticultural firm James Veitch & Sons hired Kew-trained Wilson to retrace Henry’s footsteps and recover commercially valuable plants for the European exotic plant market, which had long operated as a hub for the global circulation of botany through colonial commercial networks. He had never been to Asia and spoke no Chinese. But, in 1900, he carried with him a map dotted with secondhand coordinates and was driven almost literary imaginary of the plant he sought.²

The real story of Wilson’s quest is a lot more complicated. Although Wilson later claimed in a 1917 account that his employer instructed him to collect nothing but the Dove Tree, that statement was likely a flourish rather than an actual directive.¹ The original Veitch contracts in the Wilson fonds at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum make no mention of the tree. He was hired not to chase a single species, but to retrieve as many commercially valuable and hardy plants as possible, particularly those documented by Augustine Henry.² Wilson had access to Henry’s Chinese assistants, who knew the geography intimately and could guide him to the precise locations. Moreover, viable seeds had already been collected by French naturalists Pere Farges and sent to Maurice de Vilmorin in Paris, where Davidia was germinated as early as 1869. The Dove Tree was already known to be desirable, but it was hardly lost. Wilson’s discovery, like so many in imperial science, was less a matter of luck than of logistical coordination and timing.

And yet, the myth of his mission took shape in the account Wilson told years later in books, lectures, and his widely read essay titled “The Story of the Davidia.” He described arriving in China with only a “half-page sketch” of the tree’s location, venturing upstream a volatile river, and suffering misfortunes en route. When Wilson reached the precise spot where Henry had seen the tree, he found it had been felled—the villagers had cut it and used it for beams in a local house. Wilson wrote about his heartbreak, that he could not sleep at night. He found a way toward redemption when he discovered a grove of eleven trees in full flower. He collected seeds and shipped them home, and the tree bloomed anew in English gardens. “I am convinced,” he claimed, “[that the Davidia] is the most interesting and most beautiful of all trees which grow in the north temperate regions.”³ In his retrospective reports, Wilson revised timelines, conflated instructions, and omitted key details to frame his story as one of a singular pursuit.⁴ Although it had been properly mapped and described, the region is still characterized as a frontier in Wilson’s prose, which promoted a familiar image of Western China as remote, unmapped, and teeming with quiet beauty.

The myth of Wilson and the Dove Tree has proven remarkably resilient. Over a century after his expedition, countless books and garden guides still describe his journey as a quest and the Dove Tree as its grail. I was also tantalized by Wilson’s gripping writing as I recalled my childhood in a Yichang transformed by rapid urbanization and the biggest river dam in the world. He evokes how “the flowers and their attendant bracts are pendulous on fairly long stalks […] stirred by the slightest breeze they resemble […] small doves hovering amongst the trees,” speaking to a kind of aesthetic longing.⁵ In these passages, he is not just reporting, but writing about a desire that, even driven by commercial and institutional motives, resonates with my personal connection to the landscape.

Yet to take Wilson’s account at face value is to miss the deeper entanglements of his role as collector, writer, and agent of an ongoing empire. The Dove Tree signified botanical value, but it also projected a period-specific attitude toward landscape. Encounters with exotic flora and fauna formed the contours of adventure tales, heroic quests across the world, confrontations with nature fueled by loss and wonder.¹ Beyond a scientific specimen, the Dove Tree became a symbol and fantasy of access, intimacy, and control. In narratives such as Wilson’s, a landscape is “discovered,” “named,” and made to flourish elsewhere. The flower is not collected but lifted from the soil of central-west China and replanted in the imagination of the West. Its white bracts connote a China full of natural beauty, yet at the constant edge of vanishing, in need of salvaging.

This constructed landscape is what I refer to as a “botanical elsewhere,” a space shaped by scale, vision and desire; an imaginative geography informed by science and romance. It exists not as a place of entangled histories, communities, and politics, but as a vast aesthetic and biological repository. In this elsewhere, nature becomes collectible. The land is an exotic foil to the tamed British garden, which embodies the promise of botanical salvation. But what is obscured in this romantic perspective? The labour of Chinese collectors, for one, who guided plant hunters through the war-torn terrains.² Or local terminology like “K’ung-tung,” one of Dove Tree’s many names, and how its erasure suggests an ambivalent memory of the ways plants were trafficked as commodities and ornaments in Victorian imperial networks, especially amid the anti-foreign sentiment in the wake of the anti-colonial and anti-Christian uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion.³

How are plants mobilized as signs of value? Wilson’s writing reveals to me that these simultaneously extractive and mythologizing attitudes toward landscape are not new. In his time, rhododendrons, dove trees, and wild lilies were hunted; today, it is coffee or other cash crops. In recent decades, specialty Arabica coffee is transforming the Southwest’s uplands, linking smallholder farms and borderland towns to Shanghai’s specialty cafés and global commodity chains. These changes are not just economic. They rework how land appears; how it is told, terraced, taxed, toured, and tasted. Indeed, Wilson’s perspective of Southwest China as abundant, peripheral, and ripe for extraction remains strong. To follow Wilson now is not to simply celebrate him as a figure or dismiss his writings. To return to him is not to redeem this mythologizing narrative, but rather to attend to the archive of longing he left behind and to ask what Wilson’s narrative of discovering the Dove Tree might mean today; “to grow something else in its place” implies other reflective narratives that may confront Wilson’s myth.

What is the allure and risk of narrating a place as lost so it can be found again? What kinds of knowledge were pruned in the name of clarity, of empire? The botanical elsewhere is not a real place. It is a geography of desire, a spatial imaginary in which flora becomes the treasure of scientific ambitions. In Wilson’s story, this elsewhere was shaped by longing for beauty, novelty, and authorship. But the elsewhere was never empty. It was populated by local guides, labourers, informants, and intermediaries. Its realities were often evaded or encapsulated through the naturalist’s gaze and systems of categorization. It was shaped by roads and rivers, by local ecological knowledge, by networks of trade and extraction.⁴ It was embedded in the history of the Veitch Nurseries’ ambitions and the Arnold Arboretum’s new vision of institutional science. It was not a pure wilderness, but a layered landscape, already established, inhabited, and co-constituted by other ways of living and naming. It hovered between the known and the unknown, between the mapped and the imagined. To untangle the “botanical elsewhere” is also to re-entangle new forms of histories, peoples, and species that undergird what we have been told about the Zomia terrain: to think with what is absent, spectral, half-remembered, and displace lonesome quests to recognize the collaborations at the heart of botanical histories.