Just over a week ago I arrived in China to spend three months as a visiting professor at the Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB), of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I am being hosted by my colleague Dr Zong-Xin Ren, and I will repeat this trip each year over the next three years. This is my first visit to Kunming because my last visiting professorship here had to be conducted remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As you can see above, KIB is adjacent to, and works closely with, Kunming Botanical Garden and I have the good fortune of being able to walk to work each day through the gardens:

As I’ve said before, I love botanic gardens because I always, always see plants that amaze and surprise me. For example, I struggled to recognise the family that this very large tree belonged to – and was surprised by the answer!

I’ll be spending my time working on some data and writing manuscripts, carrying out field work, and talking with KIB postgrads and postdocs about their projects. I’ll also give some lectures here and at other institutions in China. The first of these was last Thursday where I spoke about the role of plant-pollinator interactions in underpinning the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:

Thanks to Brazilian researcher Sinzinando ‘Nando’ Albuquerque-Lima for those last two photographs. As part of a Brazilian-funded project, Nando is here for about 8 months studying a range of plants and their pollinators.

Further afield, Zong-Xin and Nando have introduced me to some of the amazing markets and restaurants in the city and I’ve already added three new plant families to my life list of those I’ve consumed: Phyllanthaceae (the rather sour fruit of a Phyllanthus species); Alismataceae (deep-fried, ‘crisped’ roots of a Sagittaria species); and Meliaceae (the young leaves of Toona sinensis are used as a spinach):

That last photo does not show rhubarb! They are the stems of a variety of taro (Colocasia esculenta) an Araceae species. Yunnan is especially famous for its wild-collected fungi:

On Sunday afternoon Zong-Xin’s research group gave some presentations about their research, which is diverse and exciting and I look forward to discussing it with them some more in the coming months. The afternoon started with a talk by Zong-Xin himself about the history and opportunities of studying pollinators and pollination in China:

And then we all went to dinner!

That’s all for now, I’ll add updates as the weeks go by.