Mother of all gardens

"The fluttering bracts that hang down from the tree in clusters look like doves flying," he says.

While photogenic flowers get the best press in the plant kingdom, botany has always been about much more than beauty.

David Creech, horticulture professor and arboretum director at Stephen F. Austin University in Texas, says he first came to China in 1997, when a Chinese colleague at SFA won a large grant to study camptotheca, a tree that produces a compound with potential cancer-fighting properties.

That trip led to later invitations to visit China on a variety of projects.

Creech has been fascinated by breeding and selection work that Chinese professor Yin Yunlong has done with the bald cypress, a tree China is now using in highway planting, parks and coastal windbreaks.

"Chinese researchers have bred promising parents, selected superior clones and propagated them asexually into numbers that we in the USA find difficult to comprehend," Creech says.