JACK FORTUNE AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HIDDEN VALLEY reviewed by Penny Dolan

How does one start to hunt for plants? My own love of plants began with Cecily Mary Barker’s picture-and-verse Flower Fairy books, Yet the works are not pure fantasy: Barker’s charming fairies, first appearing in 1923, were based on drawings of real children in her sister’s kindergarten, while the detailed flowers and settings are painted with meticulous, botanically-accurate skill. The Flower Fairies taught me- and no doubt many others – to find and identify common plants, even though some of those flowers are rarer than they used to be.

However, Barker’s pretty fairies - still hovering around today – can surely only charm a very particular young audience. There’s space for bolder books about the history of the plants and stories for older boys and girls who would welcome tales of adventure.

I was very pleased to come across JACK FORTUNE AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HIDDEN VALLEY, a novel for 8-12 year olds, written by fellow History Girl Sue Purkiss.

Inspired by the lives of 18th century plant-hunters, Sue has written a fast-moving historical adventure story.  Jack Fortune, the young hero, is energetic and most interestingly naughty. Bored, and not allowed to attend school, he can’t resist devising tricks that shame his stern widowed Aunt Constance and horrify her genteel guests.

As a character, Jack is immediately likeable - and trouble! When he accidentally damages a priceless object, Constance summons her  brother, Uncle Edmund, insisting that he take responsibility for his young nephew.

Uncle Edmund refuses; not only is the scholarly bachelor unused to children but he is about to depart on his first plant-hunting trip to India. Jack, hearing this exciting news, wants to accompany the expedition so Uncle Edmund reluctantly agrees, while Aunt Constance, unable to face any more disobedience, agrees despite the dangers.

From this point on Jack and his uncle  – and the reader – experience a new life full of challenge and interesting people and places. They sail to Calcutta, cross the Great Plain and travel through the jungle before reaching a high mountain kingdom with a hidden valley. All the way, Jack and his uncle face setbacks and dangers: vagabonds, wild animals, “mountain sickness” and, at last, reports of a huge, legendary being who brings death to any intruders in the Hidden Valley. Moreover, Jack soon realises that an unknown traitor is spoiling the expedition’s food supplies and stirring up problems with local villagers.  Who wishes them ill? Is it Sonam, their guide or Thondup, the heir to the throne who accompanies the party, and whom Jack has begun to admire?  

Sue Purkiss’s plot moves along with plenty of pace and action and just enough description to fix the story in its historical time and place without overloading her young reader’s enjoyment. She also touches lightly and skillfully on darker issues such as servants and colonisation, but lets the bold adventure end as happily as it should.

However, I felt the book was about more than the plant-hunting quest: Jack and Uncle Edmund make a wonderfully odd and warm partnership, and the hardships met on the expedition teach them more about the other.

Bookish Uncle Edmund slowly reveals his bravely determined nature and his passion for plant-hunting. Gradually, Jack sees the burning passion that lies behind Uncle Edmund’s search, and his desperate hope that the plant will bring him fame, fortune and the approval of the influential Sir Joseph Banks when - and if -  they ever return to London.

Meanwhile, faced with real demands and responsibilities rather than endless tea-parties and polite manners, Jack becomes the boy-hero he was meant to be and is even able to accept his own inherited artistic gifts and inheritance.

One of the particular reasons I enjoyed JACK FORTUNE AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HIDDEN VALLEY was that, despite the difficulties Jack and his Uncle face, the adventure is a positive and hopeful experience and one that might encourage children to look beyond everyday life and issues in school and out into a much wider world with all its interweaving histories.

Penny Dolan

ps. Years after the Flower Fairies, my gardening interests led to a set of children’s stories based on the history of British gardening, written for re-telling at RHS Harlow Carr gardens.

NB. Alma Books have also created some downloadable activities to support of this title:  http://almabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Jack-Fortune-Activity-Book.pdf  as well as an interview with the author Sue Purkiss: http://almabooks.com/interview-sue-purkiss-author-jack-fortune/                                                                  

David Douglas, plant-hunter: 1799-1834 - by Sue Purkiss

This is the latest in my series of posts about those dashing adventurers, the plant-hunters. The previous one is here, and that has links to the earlier ones.

David Douglas, a Scot born in Scone, near Perth, in 1799, seems to have been even more indefatigable than his fellow plant hunters. He needed to be, because he had more than his fair share of bad luck, dreadful weather, and very unpleasant accidents.

Unlike the character in my forthcoming children's book about plant hunting, Jack Fortune, Douglas was interested in gardening and botany from a very early age. At the age of eleven, he became an apprentice to William Beatty, head gardener to the Earl of Mansfield at Scone Palace, later moving to Sir Robert Preston's gardens at Valleyfield, near Culross in Fife, where he also immersed himself in study in Sir Robert's library. In 1820, he began a new job at the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, where Sir William Hooker had just become Professor of Botany. (Sir William's younger son was Joseph, who later made the journeys to the Himalayas on which my Jack's travels are based - though Jack's adventures take place much earlier than Joseph's. Sorry if this is confusing...)

The Horticultural Society of London (now the RHS) had recently been set up, and when they asked Sir William if he could recommend a suitable botanical collector to work for them, he had no hesitation in suggesting Douglas.

Douglas, delighted, hastened off to London, expecting to be sent to China. Unfortunately, political unrest brought about a change of plan, and instead he was sent to New England. Following a pattern which was sadly set to continue, he endured a dreadful crossing with bad weather and a shortage of food, only to be told on arrival by immigration officials that he was too scruffy, and wouldn't be allowed to land till he'd bought some new clothes.

Vast tracts of America were as yet unexplored by settlers, so when Douglas set off into the interior - near Lake Eyrie - he was pretty much venturing into the unknown. He was thrilled by the wilderness and plunged happily into collecting lots of seed, despite his horse bolting (it turned out it only understood French), his cart driver stealing his possessions and abandoning him, and almost sinking on his way back to Buffalo in one of the violent storms which seemed to positively pursue him.

Somehow he got safely back to London, where the Horticultural Society was delighted with the species he'd brought home, which included a wide variety of fruit trees - perfect for the walled gardens of Britain's country houses.

His next trip was to the Pacific North-west of America, which entailed travelling all the way round the tip of South America and up the other side - it took eight and a half months. Living at Fort Vancouver, the base of the Hudson bay Company, he came to know and admire the Native Americans and use them as guides. Doubtless amused by his plant-hunting activities, they called him 'Grass Man'.

Flowering currant

Here he came across the flowering currant, which graces and scents so many gardens in spring, and the majestic fir which bears his name. He travelled by canoe up the Columbia River, and explored the countryside, battling with challenging terrain, hot sun, exhaustion and hunger.

Returning to Fort Vancouver, our unfortunate hero intended to catch a boat back to England, but missed it by an hour after being delayed by an abscess in his knee joint, caused when he cut himself on a rusty nail. So he stayed, and the following spring climbed the Blue Mountains, naturally encountering terrible weather. Partly as a result of snow-blindness, and partly due to sand which got in his eyes in the desert, he began to have problems with his eyesight.

The Douglas Fir, which can live for over a 1000 years.

So it went on. He continued to collect plants and seeds, despite falling down a ravine, encountering grizzly bears, and almost getting drowned in Hudson Bay.

Not surprisingly, when he returned to London, he found it difficult to fit in. Two years later, he set off again for North America. He revisited the Columbia River and then headed south to California, popped in to Hawaii and then went back north. He wanted to visit Alaska and then head home via Siberia. (!) However, with his usual luck, he lost all his possessions, his plant collection and his journal, when his canoe ran on to rocks in the Frazier river and he was thrown into the water and caught up in a whirlpool.

Understandably disheartened and in poor health, he decided to return to Hawaii. It was to prove a disastrous decision. Whilst staying with a local man named Ned Gurney, who trapped wild cattle for a living, using covered pits to trap the animals. At some point, Douglas apparently heard the cries of a bullock which had been trapped in a pit, went to investigate, fell in, and was gored and trampled to death; only being found some hours later.

Obviously, this was a tragic end for such a courageous man. But he had achieved a great deal. Britain has only three native conifers (the yew, the Scots pine, and common juniper): a great proportion of the conifers which form part of Britain's garden landscape today were introduced by him, as were the trees which later formed the basis for forestry enterprises all over the world. If you've ever despaired of the rows of conifers marching over British hills, you might have mixed feeling about this; but I don't think we can blame Douglas for the way his introductions were used - and we can only admire his dogged courage and persistence, in the face of a barrage of bad luck and unfortunate accidents.

(I am as ever indebted for my accounts of the plant hunters to 'The Plant Hunters', by Musgrave, Gardner and Musgrave - a really fascinating book.)

In search of the plant hunters: Sue Purkiss

At the end of September, I have a new book coming out. It's called Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, it's published by Alma Books, and it's about a boy and his uncle who go off plant hunting to the Himalayas at the end of the 18th century.

I say it's about plant hunting, and in a way it is. But it struck me when I re-read it recently that you could also say it's about conquering your fears. And you certainly needed to be able to do that if you were a plant hunter in those days - and in fact you still do, as we shall see later: because hunting for new plants meant heading off into remote and often inhospitable places, without the conveniences of good roads (or indeed any roads) or communications technology - and just dealing with whatever you happened to find. And you could find some pretty scary things: pirates, unfriendly locals, precipitous paths and swaying rope bridges, swamps, turbulent rivers, dense forests inhabited by leeches, snakes and animals which wanted to eat you - and so on.

Many of the plants we have in our gardens are not native to Britain - think of clematis, tulips, horse chestnuts, lilies, magnolias, orchids, jasmine. Of course, plants have been migrants for centuries; the Romans took favourite plants with them as their empire expanded, and later, monks in mediaeval monasteries were enthusiastic gardeners who swapped plants, as gardeners always do. But it was in the seventeenth century that plant hunting, in the sense of purposefully going off to explore new territories with the aim of finding new plants, really took off.

Looking back from where we are now, it's uncomfortably clear that plant hunting often went hand in hand with colonial expansion. So the Tradescants, for example, went to Canada and Virginia for plants because North America was being explored with a view to it being settled by the British and others from Western Europe. Sir Joseph Banks didn't set off with Captain Cook to explore the Great Southern Continent purely out of a Romantic desire for knowledge (though I'm sure that was a big part of his motivation); what Britain could get out of it was a big factor.

But the aspect of plant-hunting that really seized my imagination when I first began to read up on it some years ago (I read about the Tradescants in Philippa Gregory's hugely enjoyable Virgin Earth and Earthly Joys, and about the plant hunters generally in the excellent and very informative The Plant Hunters, by Toby Musgrave et al) was how insanely brave these people were: some of them didn't survive their adventures. I imagined a boy, an orphan; one of those children who's always getting into trouble because he's just got so much energy, and because he doesn't think ahead. My boy Jack wants to be an explorer, and can't believe his luck when his aunt, driven to distraction, declares that she can't manage him any longer, and it's the turn of her brother - who, in a move which is utterly uncharacteristic, has just decided to set off on a plant hunting expedition to the Himalayas.

Ton Hart Dyke

As I mentioned earlier, plant hunting can still be a dangerous activity. Tom Hart Dyke is a plant hunter whose family has lived for centuries in Lullingstone Castle in Kent. He was catapulted into the news when he and his friend, Tom Winder, were kidnapped while plant hunting in the Columbian jungle in 2000, and held for nine months. You can read here about their ordeal - and about how the experience led to him conceiving the idea of creating a 'World Garden', which he set about creating at Lullingstone on his return home.

I shall return to those insanely brave earlier plant hunters over the next few months. Indiana Jones, eat your heart out - who needs to hunt for ancient archaeological artefacts when you can hunt for plants?  (Oops - just remembered a certain scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - not literally, Indie: not literally...)

And finally, a little hint as to what Jack and his uncle desperately want to find...