Biography

British plant collector famed for introducing a great many plants from China into cultivation in Europe. George Forrest was born in Falkirk, Stirlingshire, where his father was a draper's assistant. The family moved to Kilmarnock when Forrest was four years old, where his father set up a business. After his schooling he began training as a chemist, but after receiving a modest inheritance he abandoned this in favour of travelling. He first went to visit relatives in Australia in 1891, working on a sheep station and in the goldfields, before returning to Scotland in 1902, by way of South Africa. He then joined his widowed mother living near Edinburgh, where, thanks to an acquaintance with the keeper of the Royal Botanic Gardens, he obtained a post as a herbarium assistant. Here he learned about taxonomy and gained a reputation for ascetism due to eschewing chairs and walking 12 miles to and from work each day.

Edinburgh's Regius Keeper, Isaac Bayley Balfour, noticed Forrest's hardy disposition and recommended him as a plant collector for A.K. Bulley. Bulley, a Liverpool cotton broker and horticulturist, was looking to sponsor an expedition to south-west China at this time in order to stock a nursery with Chinese plants. Thus Forrest set off on his first expedition in 1905 (he would carry out six more). The trip was high on adventure, for the Batang lamas of Tibet were at that time extremely hostile towards outsiders, thanks to the recent Younghusband massacre. In fact, Forrest was the only survivor of his party of 17 local plant collectors, who were all murdered after returning to their base at a French mission after a day's collecting in the rhododendron forests of north-west Yunnan. Forrest escaped the bloodshed, losing all his notes and collections and hampered by a foot pierced with a bamboo stake. Once he had reached safety, however (helped by the indigenous Lissu people), he continued to make more collections, travelling with George Litton of the British Consulate in the Salween district. Again, Forrest survived where his co-collector did not; Litton died soon after the end of the expedition, struck down by malaria. Forrest carried on with another collecting trip, during which he too contracted malaria. Despite the hardships endured, he returned to Britain in 1906 with a prodigious load of living and dried plant material.

Safely back in Edinburgh, Forrest married fellow herbarium worker Clementina Traill in 1907. They had three sons together, but Forrest must barely have seen them while they were children, for he spent more time in China than at home over the next 25 years. Indeed, despite his terrible first experience in the country, he was enamoured with the tantalising flora of Yunnan and leapt at the chance to return in 1910. This time he travelled on behalf of a syndicate headed by Bulley. However, the pair fell out and Forrest defected to a rival of Bulley's, J.C. Williams. Frank Kingdon-Ward was appointed in Forrest's place and the two plant hunters immediately became possessive over the spoils of Yunnan and other botanically-rich territories.

Forrest's final Chinese expedition was mounted in 1930 and resulted in his richest haul. It also saw his demise; having accomplished all he had set out to do on the expedition, he collapsed and died of heart failure in Tengchung, western Yunnan. The Edinburgh botanic gardens received the greatest past of Forrest's herbarium material, numbering some 31,000 specimens. Among there were more than 1,000 species new to science, though Forrest himself was not interested in taxonomic work and left the determination of his collections to others, primarily Bayley Balfour. He also collected birds, insects, mammals and ethnographic material on his travels in north Burma, eastern Tibet, Yunnan and Sichuan; these were divided between museums in Britain.

Forrest's work naturally accorded him high accolades. He was honoured with the Royal Horticultural Society's Victoria Medal of Honour in 1921 and the Veitch Memorial Medal in 1927, and was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1924. He received the Rhododendron Cup of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1930 in recognition of his discovery of 260 species of the genus, including one named in his honour, Rhododendron forrestii Balf.f. ex Diels. Forrest never found the time to complete a written account of his experiences as a plant hunter, though he described his arduous first expedition in the Gardeners' Chronicle in 1910 under the apt heading "The Perils of Plant Collecting". His name lives on in numerous species epithets.

Sources:
D.E. Allen, 2004, "Forrest, George (1873-1932)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn:
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/51283, accessed 24 February 2011
G. Forrest, 1910, "The Perils of Plant Collecting", Gardeners' Chronicle, May 1910: 325-326, 344
J. Keenan, 1973, "George Forrest, 1873-1932", Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, 98: 112-117
B. McLean, 2004, George Forrest: plant hunter
P.S. Short, 2003, In Pursuit of Plants: 107-116
G. Taylor, 1932, Journal of Botany, British and Foreign, 70: 79-81.