Jungle book has been more than 200 years in the making

BUMPING along on the back of a slow, cumbersome elephant, Dr Mark Watson made gradual progress through the tropical jungle of Nepal.

• Dr Mark Watson is set to continue his research in Nepal, following on from 19th-century botanist Francis Buchanan Hamilton

Around him, lush and rich, were the unusual plants, flowers and shrubs he'd travelled all the way from Edinburgh to collect. And there, too, lurking somewhere in the depths of the steamy jungle, were rhinos, leopards and tigers, silent, watching and perhaps waiting, set to pounce.

Beyond the jungle would be physically gruelling treks into the high altitude Everest regions, mile after mile on dust tracks led by hardy Sherpas with belongings strapped to yaks, and then on further, into politically unstable areas where locals and soldiers watched suspicious eyes.

It all sounds a bit gung-ho for a man on the mission to simply collect plant specimens. But, admits Dr Watson, while journeying through rich jungle on the back of a plodding great elephant is a novel way to commute to work, it's just a small flavour of what the man in whose 200-year-old footsteps he's following, once endured.

Today Dr Watson is in the relative comfort of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh preparing for his next journey into the steamy jungles and remote mountains of Nepal. This expedition - his 16th to Nepal - will become yet another instalment in an adventure that began with an Edinburgh-based botanist from another age whose work is only now, finally, reaching a conclusion.

In September, more than 200 years since Francis Buchanan-Hamilton became the first person to collect Nepalese plants and begin the mind-boggling task of identifying them, Dr Watson and his team will finally publish the first of what will be ten volumes of their combined work, a catalogue of thousands of species that spans centuries all drawn from one of the most ecologically diverse places on Earth.

Gathering the information, analysing each specimen - from colourful Rhododendrons to delicate Primulas and hardy conifers to evergreen oaks - and fitting it into the right category has been a phenomenal task that has endured wars, political unrest and environmental challenges that 19th-century plant pioneer Francis Buchanan-Hamilton could barely have imagined.

"It is incredible to think that all this began 200 years ago and is only now coming to a conclusion," says Dr Watson, as he takes a break from preparing for the trip to Nepal later this month.

"Getting to the stage of publishing the first of what will be ten volumes . . . well, it's ground-breaking. There has been a knowledge gap in this area and now, for the first time, it's being filled. Before, there were just a lot of species with names but no tools to identify them."

Two centuries of combined efforts mean that not only will the plants be easily identified by fellow botanists, but Flora of Nepal will become a vital tool for scientific research for years to come.

For lurking within its volumes could well be species from the plant world that may one day provide cures and remedies for ailments that so far have baffled medicine.

It will also provide a valuable resource in the battle with climate change. A full record of Nepal's plants and where they can be found today will, in years to come, help gauge the impact of climate change on their progress.

And that, in turn, can help environmentalists assess changes in the food chain of many species of wildlife whose very survival depends on the bio-diversity of the land around them.

But none of that would have been on Edinburgh-trained medic and botanist Francis Buchanan-Hamilton's mind when he embarked upon what would surely have been a death-defying journey into the largely unchartered territory of Nepal in 1802.

He had studied medicine at Edinburgh University and botany at the city's Botanic Garden, learning about the plant world under Professor John Hope, a name familiar to many of today's visitors who pass through the doors of the John Hope Gateway.

The early 1800s was a time of expansion for the British East India Company. As it sought to broaden its trade interests, it embarked on a series of political missions and environmental surveys aimed at establishing links and exploiting whatever resources it might find.

"He was part of a political envoy sent to Nepal with the hope of developing trade with Nepal," explains Dr Watson. "He was the ship's surgeon at the time but, like many men of his day, there were many strings to his bow.

"But the Nepalese government was very suspicious of the East India Company. They designated an area outside the Capital for them to live and left them there, twiddling their thumbs, for a year."

One of Buchanan-Hamilton's tasks was to document the many plants he found on his travels. With nothing else to do, he launched himself into collecting the first of 1000 different species on the land in and around the site.

Among the collection were around 800 species entirely new to science.

"He was around a third of the way through writing up what he'd found when he was called back to England," adds Dr Watson. "He passed on what he had to one of the major botanists of the time, James Edward Smith, president of the Linnean Society, but he actually did very little with them and the work languished, unstudied, for years."

Buchanan-Hamilton returned to survey the Bengal area, but while some botanists attempted to continue his Nepalese work, they were hampered by Smith's decision - perhaps a case of professional jealousy - to withhold Buchanan-Hamilton's papers, drawings and assessments.

Even once they did become available, there was a further setback when political restrictions were imposed by the Nepalese on foreigners - a barrier to research that remained in place until the 1950s.

The lifting of restrictions has enabled fresh links to be forged between the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, a new generation of botanists in Nepal and interested botanists in Japan.

Their next combined challenge, however, was to complete the job Buchanan-Hamilton set out to start.

"Nepal was closed to foreigners for so long," reflects Dr Watson. "There's this big gap for 150 years. So it's just in the last 50 years that there has been proper, intensive botanical exploration across the country."

In recent years, Dr Watson and colleagues have returned to Nepal time and again, their travels taking them to remote areas such as the high mountains of the Sagarmatha and Royal Chitwan national parks in the Everest foothills. There they would collect Rhododendron and junipers by day and spend evenings in tents, computers and cameras - unlike Buchanan-Hamilton, who sketched his specimens and hand wrote laborious notes - charged by electricity from a small generator.

Other expeditions have placed them in the swelter of Nepal's jungle, home to potentially dangerous tigers and rhinos, and deep in forests in the Kathmandu valley - the very area once picked over by Buchanan-Hamilton.

The scale of the task is immense: Nepal, though financially poor, is one of the world's top 20 ecological hotspots, with an area smaller than the UK but with up to five times the plant life species. Within its borders is a miniature climate system - hot and humid in the south east, dry and cold in the north - its altitude spans 70 metres to 8850m, the highest point on earth.

"There is pressure to make money and some plants have commercial value," adds Dr Watson. "And there is also the issue of deforestation too. Plants come under threat from habitat change, from invasive alien species - bully plants that harm the native stuff.

"And we are seeing noticeable changes from climate change - recent erratic monsoon weather has seen Mustang have rainfall unlike any other in living memory which collapsed mud roofs."Who knows what effect that will have on the plants?"

In turn that affects wildlife - making the record of Nepal's plant life more than simply a book about plants.

"It has been a very long gestation period to get to the stage of actually giving birth to volume one," says Dr Watson, adding the publication in September may well be a cause for some celebration.

"It is quite amazing to think all this began 200 years ago."

Animal sculptures highlight threats to endangered species

MOST people think of Nepal and imagine snow-capped mountain peaks. However, the nation is also home to lowland jungles that are rich in wildlife.

Now the joint effort between the botanists and wildlife conservationists in the area is being highlighted in a colourful new exhibition of animal sculptures.

More than 100 sculptures of endangered Asian animals, including elephants, tigers and orangutans, will arrive at the Botanics in Inverleith next week as part of Jungle City, a major fundraising event organised by the charity, Elephant Family.

The imaginatively painted creatures will remain there until early September before being auctioned for the charity.

Edinburgh-based botanists have been working with the Royal Zoological Society in London in Nepal's jungle, helping to identify issues with plant life there that could impact on animals in the area.