The Holy Trinity

'Hi Tom, Bleddyn here. Fancy a trip to Vietnam? Let me know as soon as you can.'

So went the message on my voicemail. Bleddyn Wynn-Jones is the co-proprietor of Crûg Farm Plants (www.crug-farm.co.uk), the world's best nursery, and the proximate reason I currently spend about 18 hours a day tending my plants. In other words, this is all his bloody fault.

About six or seven years ago I started buying plants from Crûg and, as many others before me have discovered, once you start down that road it leads inexorably to financial and moral ruin. At a certain point, having just parted with £150 for a plant of Schefflera macrophylla (look and lust), I joked to Sue Wynn-Jones that if I ran out of money I could always feed the Schefflera to my kids. When she expressed an appropriate degree of horror at this prospect I reassured her that I would never feed such a rare plant to my kids, even if they developed scurvy. The bloody Schefflera died in its first winter but I now have another specimen, bought for me as an anniversary present by my wife, which will see out its days in a greenhouse.

Bleddyn, Sue and the late Peter Wharton had collected the seed from which my plant had grown on Fan Si Pan, a mountain in the north of Vietnam, near the Yunnan border, an area with higher vascular plant biodiversity than virtually anywhere on earth (see map below).

The arrowhead points to Fan Si Pan. Red indicates areas of very high plant diversity

It was to this mountain that Bleddyn was now proposing I accompany him, on a four week plant hunting trip. My invitation had come at the last minute because his original traveling companion had done a bunk. It was like getting a call from God the Father to say that Jesus had pulled a sickie and would I mind doing a stint at his right side. I pretended to consider the offer carefully for the 24 hours I was given to make up my mind before calling back to say I was in. But no harp music.

We are trying to persuade a mutual friend to join us, for at least part of the trip. If we succeed in twisting his arm, I propose christening (no offense) our expedition The Holy Trinity. That would look cool on future labels. Instead of the familiar BSWJ collection numbers, we'd be FS&HG0001, etc.