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China is one of the country that has the richest higher plants species in the world, which contains about 30000 species. The southwest of China, especially Yunnan and Sichuan province, have the richest plant diversity, including more than 60% plant species of China.
This area is located in the transition zone of western China subtropical mountains to Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, which has long history of geology, huge disparity in altitude, and extremely complex natural conditions. Many kinds of landforms can be found here, such as plateau, mountains, gorges, plains and so on. The climates here are also various from subtropical to cold zones, providing comfortable conditions for reproduction and differentiation of various groups of plants.
Thanks to all these factors, thousands of wild flowers flourish in this area. Every year in 5-9 months, all kinds of flowers bloom, dressing the mountains as a big natural garden. It is the paradise for following plant genera: Meconopsis, Primula, Rhododendron, Gentiana, Pedicularis, Corydalis, Lilium, Saxifraga, Clematis, Cypripedium and so on... The majority of these genera members are distributed in China, and most of them are endemic. For example, there are more than 900 kinds of Rhododendron in the world, about 570 species grow in China, and 409 are endemic.
It has been considered as one of the world's most biodiverse areas by a number of international environmental protection organizations.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth Centuries, many western plant hunters collected countless Chinese plants back to the west, which have greatly enriched their gardens. The representative such as Ernest Henry Wilson, visited China especially Sichuan for ten years, introduced about 2000 plant species to the west. Later, he wrote a book, and made a conclusion: China is the mother of gardens in the world.
