“And they're incredible evergreen ground covers, highly textural, weed suppressing. And as I garden with them more at my first garden, Heronswood, I just started falling madly in love with them. Wondering why is it that these plants don't have a stronger foothold in horticulture worldwide? In Myanmar in 2013, it was just completely serendipitous that one of the camps on our route was called Coptus Camp. That was referring to the fact that this is a camp that on a yearly basis, the Coptus collectors came to dig the plants because they're so highly valuable in traditional medicine. And so the Coptus collectors would come dig the plants and then sell them to other countries for their highly medicinal purposes. And then of course that even intrigued me more as to where the different species grow and how much do they differ from one another. Then in China, on Imei Shan in Szechuan Province, coming across the most beautiful of the species, in my estimation, Coptus omiana, which is for all intents and purposes, if you look at it, a gorgeous evergreen fern. In fact, it looks so much like a fern that even king plants people will turn[…]” ![[Mukdenia rossii.jpg]] From Gardening with the RHS: Learning From The Wild, 5 Mar 2026 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/gardening-with-the-rhs/id605769651?i=1000753350804&r=599 This material may be protected by copyright. “It used to be called Acerophyllum rassii. It's now called Mucdenia rassii. It's popular in the trade, and anybody who is a keen gardener probably has it. And I believe that because it was in the Saxa Frage family to be a plant that wanted full sun and sharp drainage. And it wasn't until I first saw it in Korea in 1993, growing right alongside a stream, in fact, so close to the water's edge that it would have been submerged by water during the spring runoff. And I immediately came back. I mean, one of the first things I did was to move that, that struggling Mucdenia into a much moisture condition in my garden. And it immediately burst into growth. So that's just one example that's been repeated over and over again over the past four decades.” From Gardening with the RHS: Learning From The Wild, 5 Mar 2026 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/gardening-with-the-rhs/id605769651?i=1000753350804&r=426 This material may be protected by copyright.