Among Flowers Read Online Free PDF Page A

there was still lots of chatter and lingering. In any case, we were not tired. Dan and I lay in our tent laughing and chatting for such a long, loud time that the next day Sue and Bleddyn asked us to tell them what was so funny. It was only Dan telling me about a journey he had just made to South Africa with another botanist and how awkward it had been to observe someone who was married, and having an affair, start up yet another affair, and the unexpected arrival of the lover who was not the husband, bearing flowers and chocolates. That night too, I began reading The Kanchenjunga Adventure, Frank Smythe’s book about an attempt made to climb Kanchenjunga in 1930, a book I had bought at the Pilgrims Book House in Kathmandu. Until that moment I don’t think I had ever heard the name Kanchenjunga before. But I was drawn to it as if a spell had been cast over me; first the book and then the mountain, and all the way on my walk, there was nothing I wanted to see more. For my twenty some days I spent walking among the hills of the Himalaya, I lugged this book around; and for many days after I got back, this book was like a child’s comforter to me.
    To Khandbari: Dan and Bleddyn seem to have gone over the map again and again. Should we go by the way of Jaljale Himal and the Milke Danda, more or less the way they had gone before in 1996, or should they go another way, the first three days of which would be the same as the last three days of that 1996 trip? They went back and forth, finally deciding that yes, the first three days of this trip should repeat the route of the last three days of the 1996 trip. This decision was of great importance to these two nurserymen, for a seed-collecting journey is so difficult. Every square foot of terrain must be carefully pored over so that not a single garden-worthy plant is missed, the poor collector not knowing if he will ever be able to come this way again. A true nurseryman is a gardener, a gardener is a person of all kinds, but in particular a gardener is a person who at least once in the gardening year feels the urge to possess completely at least one plant. This form of possession excludes mere buying or being one of the three people in the world who owns something that is variegated or double flowering when the norm is not. This form of possession comes from seeing something in seed on the knife-sharp edge of a precipice and collecting those seeds, and only after the seeds are in a bag realizing that for a few seconds possibly your life was in question. You can hear this form of possession in the voice of someone who will utter a sentence like this: “I saw some Codonopsis growing up there, couldn’t tell which one it was but I took seeds anyway.” That is no ordinary sentence said in an ordinary voice. The person who says such a sentence is in a complicated state of craving, for they are aware that they haven’t invented Codonopsis , but having found it in its natural growing area, a place where most people who grow Codonopsis as an ornament would shun living, they feel godlike, as if they had invented Codonopsis , as if without them no one growing Codonopsis as an ornament would do so. Dan and Bleddyn are nurserymen. Sue, of course is a nurseryman too, but she is a different kind of nurseryman. Sue was always quite happy to point out to Bleddyn and Dan a plant in seed as she walked along to our destination.
    The nurserymen had decided we would follow the Arun River, spend a day going up the banks of the Barun River starting where it emptied into the Arun, then come back to the Arun leaving it behind when we turned to go toward the fabled village of Thudam.
    That first morning, that very first morning after we left Kathmandu, would soon become routine: being awoken at half past five by Table, who brought us a cup of hot tea and a basin of hot water for washing up. I love to be in bed and hate getting out of it quickly, so I lingered then, and always lingered