Garden Plants - Dicentra

The common name for the dicentra is bleeding heart, and if you look at it the right way up, so that its flowers droop - it does resemble a heart dripping blood. But if you turn it the other way up, and open it slightly, you do get the ruder name 'lady in the bath'! The full botanical name is dicentra spectabilis, which is the Greek di = two, kentron = spur and spectabilis = spectacular.

In 1842, the Treaty of Nanking was signed. Under the treaty, China agreed to cede Hong Kong to the British Empire, and open some Chinese ports for foreign trade, in addition China was forced to allow British missionaries into the interior of China for the first time, and to let British merchants establish 'spheres of influence' - markets etc, in and around British ports. The treaty left several unsettled issues. In particular it did not resolve the status of the opium trade with China, which was profitable for the British and devastating to the Chinese. It was the beginning of the end of the great Chinese Empire, and the beginning of the huge trade in rare and new plants that would flood into Europe and North America once China's mysterious interior was opened up.

One of the first explorers of the interior was Robert Fortune. He travelled into areas that were still forbidden to non-Chinese, wearing a pigtail made of horsehair, and native clothing. His problems were immense, not least that he couldn't eat in roadside inns because he wasn't proficient enough with chopsticks to fool real Chinese people, so he had a lot of hungry nights! It was Fortune who brought back the dicentra to Britain, although this is not his most famous act - he was the man who, pretty well single-handedly, created the tea industries of India and Ceylon and ended China's natural tea monopoly.

Garden Dicentra photograph by Jon Redshaw, used under a creative commons attribution licence