Our parks and gardens are full of much-loved flowers from China. We owe their presence to a group of men who devoted their lives, and sometimes sacrificed them, to saving souls but also delighted in discovering a wealth of ornamental plants China’s remote heartland was the destination of hundreds of young European missionaries in the nineteenth century­. They found themselves in a region that contained one of the richest and most varied floras in the world. Many of the missionaries were enthusiastic botanists fascinated by the astonishing ­vegetation surrounding their villages. Some of the plants they discovered still resonate with gardeners: Davidia involucrata, Buddleja davidii, Osmanthus delavayi, Paeonia delavayi, Fargesia nitida, Paulownia fargesii, Rosa soulieana &hel