The flowering plants in a garden, and their variety of colour and form, are the result of hundreds of years of tradition, science, skill and intrepid exploration. They may be native plants which have been carefully selected to provide larger blooms or a great colour range, exotic species with origins in distant lands, or cultivars which have been painstakingly bred to confirm to an ideal of shape and form. This book probes into the past histories of many of the world's most popular cultivated plants, to discover how and where they lived in the wild, and relates uplifting tales of their discovery is some of the remotest regions on earth.