‘I hadn’t realised how much I had missed the genuine adventure story until I read The Rose of Tibet…’ So wrote Graham Greene of Lionel Davidson’s 1962 novel. I myself didn’t read The Rose of Tibet until it was reissued by Faber & Faber in 2016, but having come to it late, I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with the great ‘Grisjambon Vert’ (as Evelyn Waugh famously dubbed Greene).
The novel boasts exotic locations (India, Tibet), perilous predicaments (snowstorms, altitude sickness) and priceless treasure (sackfuls of emeralds). It transported me back to the books I’d loved reading as a boy. The first series I became truly addicted to was by Willard Price, who wrote about two young brothers, Hal and Roger Hunt, who travelled the world capturing endangered animals for their father’s zoological collection in America. The books may make for somewhat uncomfortable reading today, but the brothers’ thrilling adventures in far-flung places, and remarkable ability to get themselves in and out of trouble, were mesmerising to my 9-year-old self.
At the same time as I was devouring Willard Price, Panini issued a collection of World Wildlife Fund stickers, which were the hottest property in the school playground once the 1986 World Cup sticker-rush was over. Just as I’d memorised the name of every animal in Price’s books, so I did with every creature in my WWF album – from the serval to the liontail macaque, I can still picture them all today if I close my eyes.
My next stop was the school library. Deeming Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines a little too dense for my 10-year-old tastes, I was drawn to animal-related adventures with tantalising titles – The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, even David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest series. None quite hit the heights of Willard Price, but they kept me going until I departed a few years later for secondary school, where such books were considered beyond the pale.
Since becoming a novelist myself, I suppose there’s always been a part of my subconscious on the lookout for material for an adventure story. Maybe it was reading Greene’s comment that rekindled it, as it was not long after finishing The Rose of Tibet that the ideal subject matter fell into my lap.
A friend who volunteered at a retirement home near our children’s school in Chelsea asked me to give a talk about the series of crime novels I had written set in Gibraltar. I was happy to oblige, and ended up staying behind to hand out tea and biscuits to the residents. It was there that I heard about the subject of a future talk by a local historian: how Chelsea had evolved through the ages.
Intrigued by the subject matter, I duly turned up two weeks later, and was hooked. Forget miniskirts and Mary Quant: in Victorian times, the King’s Road had been famous for plant nurseries, their most dazzling and exotic stock provided by professional plant hunters.
The term ‘plant hunter’ caught my imagination. I’d always associated hunting with chasing things that didn’t want to be caught. How could you hunt something that was literally rooted to the ground?
Back home, I began to read up on the history of plant hunters, and was amazed to learn of their hair-raising expeditions to distant lands. They were every bit as intrepid and reckless as my old friends Hal and Roger Hunt – or Indiana Jones, for that matter – but in search of a quarry that was much more unusual.
That summer, at a street fair near where we live in Battersea, I came across an old man with a stall selling Victorian Ordnance Survey maps. I bought one of Chelsea in 1865, and sure enough, marked at various points along the King’s Road were plant nurseries, some of them stretching all the way down to the Thames.
I had a sudden vision of a smoky tavern on the King’s Road, where sunburned plant hunters would gather to swap stories, courted by wealthy nurserymen in the market for the most sought-after blooms, and fawned over by adoring members of the public who saw them as the Premier League stars of their day. Money, danger, excitement, exotic travel… Time to stop looking for the genuine adventure story to read, I decided, and start writing one instead.
The Plant Hunter by T I Mogford (Welbeck Publishing Group) Out Now
1867. King's Road, Chelsea, is a sea of plant nurseries, catering to the Victorian obsession with rare and exotic flora. But each of the glossy emporiums is fuelled by the dangerous world of the plant hunters - daring adventurers sent into uncharted lands in search of untold wonders to grace England's finest gardens. Harry Compton is as far from a plant hunter as one could imagine - a salesman plucked from the obscurity of the nursery growing fields to become 'the face that sold a thousand plants'. But one small act of kindness sees him inherit a precious gift - a specimen of a fabled tree last heard of in The Travels of Marco Polo, and a map. Seizing his chance for fame and fortune, Harry sets out to make his mark. But where there is wealth there is corruption, and soon Harry is fleeing England, rounding the Cape of Good Hope and sailing up the Yangtze alongside a young widow - both in pursuit of the plant that could transform both their lives forever.
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