| SLIDESHOW | CELEBRATING RHODODENDRONS |
Slideshow: Celebrating Bhutan's Wild Rhododendron Blooms
Images of Bhutan's annual wild rhododendron blooms. Scroll down for caption details. Looking for a journey featuring rhododendrons? Please see our annual itinerary Bhutan in the Time of Rhododendrons.
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1. Mute Explosions
If you’re considering travel in the spring Bhutan’s wild rhododendrons are the thing to see. Each year from March to May they arrive and flower, setting off mute explosions of scarlet, cream, gold and white ruffles across the slopes of the mighty Himalayas.
Slideshow: Celebrating Bhutan's Wild Rhododendron Blooms
Images of Bhutan's annual wild rhododendron blooms. Scroll down for caption details. Looking for a journey featuring rhododendrons? Please see our annual itinerary Bhutan in the Time of Rhododendrons.
2. Many-colored Blooms
Bhutan’s rhododendrons are myriad, manifesting in all manner of hues and shades and ranging from dense shrubs to trees over 65 feet tall! Some of these ancient trees in the Himalayas are the progenitors of what later became cultivated and celebrated in polite botanical gardens across England, Europe and the West. To read a fascinating account of how these natives of the Himalayas were bred, cultivated and “civilized” (my words, not the author’s), read Tales of the Rose Tree: Ravishing Rhododendrons and Their Travels Around the World by Jane Brown (320 pages; HarperPerennial, 2005).
Slideshow: Celebrating Bhutan's Wild Rhododendron Blooms
Images of Bhutan's annual wild rhododendron blooms. Scroll down for caption details. Looking for a journey featuring rhododendrons? Please see our annual itinerary Bhutan in the Time of Rhododendrons.
3. In the Wild
Part of the appeal of seeing rhododendrons in Bhutan may lie in the fact that, in their native Himalayan forests, the garden varieties of rhododendron that most people have come to know recede from the mind, making way for the magnificently effusive blooms that have made the Himalayas famous among enthusiasts. One such was the early 20th century naturalist Frank Kingdon Ward, who likened the native blooming rhododendrons he saw in the region to “fiery curtains,” “incandescent lava,” and “sea-tarnished metal” (Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges: Retracing the Epic Journey of 1924-25 in South-East Tibet; edited by Kenneth Cox, Antique Collectors Club Ltd., August 2001). Unfettered from the limits of human aesthetic conceptions, the wild rhododendrons of Bhutan have a primal grandeur that makes stumbling across a particularly well-endowed grove along the kingdom’s many forested trails, treks and roadsides an awe-inspiring experience. Perhaps it’s not surprising that they are celebrated all over Bhutan in song, given as lover’s gifts, and form the backdrop of many a family portrait taken in the spring.
Slideshow: Celebrating Bhutan's Wild Rhododendron Blooms
Images of Bhutan's annual wild rhododendron blooms. Scroll down for caption details. Looking for a journey featuring rhododendrons? Please see our annual itinerary Bhutan in the Time of Rhododendrons.
4. Memories
When I was a boy my father would often make us put on our best clothes at the beginning of the flowering season. He’d then drive the family in an open jeep on the winding road into the mountains above the capital, Thimphu. Pulling off to a small curve of compacted dirt with a view of the glittering Himalayan peaks, he would bundle us out in our shining ghos and kiras. My mother, my sisters and I would then be herded up the forested trail to find the sheltering arches of an ancient rhododendron tree. Making sure there was good lighting my father would set up his old Kodak on a tripod until the entire frame was filled with the brilliance of our best brocades and silks clashing with the wild trumpets and blooms of the sumptuous tree. Setting the timer on the camera he’d jog over to join us in the frame, put his hand on hips, set his hat jauntily, and toss a black-and-white polka-dot scarf around his neck for good measure.
Slideshow: Celebrating Bhutan's Wild Rhododendron Blooms
Images of Bhutan's annual wild rhododendron blooms. Scroll down for caption details. Looking for a journey featuring rhododendrons? Please see our annual itinerary Bhutan in the Time of Rhododendrons.
5. Crazy About Rhododendrons
For a time, I thought it was only my family that suffered from this temporary insanity caused by the annual return of the rhododendrons. However, reading the Jane Brown book, I realize there is a long tradition of becoming more than a little colored by one’s passion for rhododendrons. In fact, in one of the book’s passages, she quotes a Chinese poet, Cheng Yanxlong, who compares the red flowers of the rhododendron to—paraphrasing—blood dropped from the mouths of cuckoo birds. A very influential work in spreading the popularity of rhododendrons worldwide was Joseph Hooker’s Rhododendrons of the Sikkim-Himalaya. Published in 1849, it ushered the 19th century craze among gardeners, botanists, collectors and society aesthetes in England and the United States. A flurry of artists—including Victorian adventurer Marianne North (1830-1890)—began painting the flowers in a florid and gushing style matching the superlative-leaning manner in which they were being written about in the books and journals of the time.
Slideshow: Celebrating Bhutan's Wild Rhododendron Blooms
Images of Bhutan's annual wild rhododendron blooms. Scroll down for caption details. Looking for a journey featuring rhododendrons? Please see our annual itinerary Bhutan in the Time of Rhododendrons.
6. The Man and the Flower
In her book, Jane Brown credits Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (1707 ~ 78) for taking the Greek words for Rose, Rhodon, and Tree, Dendron, to come up with the binomial Rhododendron. And although the man himself died in poverty, Tales of the Rose Tree describes how the flower he named went on to a glamorous future celebrated in the great gardens of the world and once, even, cultivated by no less a personage than George Washington, first President of the United States.
Slideshow: Celebrating Bhutan's Wild Rhododendron Blooms
Images of Bhutan's annual wild rhododendron blooms. Scroll down for caption details. Looking for a journey featuring rhododendrons? Please see our annual itinerary Bhutan in the Time of Rhododendrons.
7. Celebrating Rhododendrons
Of the many varieties of rhododendron, 46 known species have been found in Bhutan, with 10 additional subspecies recorded. An annual three-day Rhododendron Festival in the mountains above capital, Thimphu, celebrates their variety, beauty and abundance, and delves into aspects of their use in traditional medicine and crafts, among others. But the best way to experience the flowers is to see them in the wild on our guided day hikes and country walks (see our Bhutan in the Time of Rhododendrons itinerary).
Slideshow: Celebrating Bhutan's Wild Rhododendron Blooms
Images of Bhutan's annual wild rhododendron blooms. Scroll down for caption details. Looking for a journey featuring rhododendrons? Please see our annual itinerary Bhutan in the Time of Rhododendrons.
8. An Archer's Call
Perhaps to recall the intense exuberance of the rhododendrons’ arrival in the spring, a Bhutanese archer pulling his bow traditionally cries:
Ethometho sha rendo
Ngi da kari pho rendo!
It’s time for rhododendrons to bloom
And it’s time for my arrows to find their mark!
Indeed, truth be told, even to those of us who were subjected to endless rounds of picture-taking amid the incandescently blooming trees, nothing says welcome to Bhutan better than a wild tumble of luscious rhododendron blooms!
Slideshow: Celebrating Bhutan's Wild Rhododendron Blooms
Images of Bhutan's annual wild rhododendron blooms. Scroll down for caption details. Looking for a journey featuring rhododendrons? Please see our annual itinerary Bhutan in the Time of Rhododendrons.
9. Further Notes:
Other interesting botanical species that you may encounter in Bhutan in the spring include spruce, tiny gentians, pedicularis (broomrape), and, higher up, snow lotus or saussurea, a rare medicinal plant. Visiting Bhutan in the spring provides the perfect opportunity for discovering unique flora found nowhere else in the world. A great naturalist’s resource, if you are traveling in Bhutan at this time, is A Photo Guide to Flowers of Bhutan by our friend Thinley Namgyel, and Karma Tenzin, published by WWF Bhutan, 2009.
Slideshow: Celebrating Bhutan's Wild Rhododendron Blooms
Images of Bhutan's annual wild rhododendron blooms. Scroll down for caption details. Looking for a journey featuring rhododendrons? Please see our annual itinerary Bhutan in the Time of Rhododendrons.
10. Royal Flower
Named for Her Majesty the Royal Grandmother of Bhutan, Ashi Kesang, the R.kesangiae is an exquisite variety of rhododendron that grows to heights of 65 feet and is found at rarefied elevations of 11,000 feet. Bhutan Himalaya Archives.
By Karma Dorji
Bhutan's annual rhododendron blooms light up the countryside. Himalayan rhododendrons are legendary and Bhutan has some of the best. Inspired? See dates and prices for our upcoming Rhododendron journey Celebrating Bhutan's Rhododendrons; also available as a feature article: The magnificence and the madness of Bhutan's wild rhododendron blooms.
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