It is Mount Kanchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world, that dominates the landscape of the Eastern Himalayas around Darjeeling, in West Bengal, and Sikkim, a separate Indian state. Joseph Hooker (1817-1911), the son of William Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, would doubtless have gazed upon its snowy heft in wonder during his excursion there between 1847 and 1851. We certainly know he also considered its foothills and likely so in spring, for he wrote in a letter now archived at Kew: ‘The splendour of the Rhododendrons is marvellous: there are 10 kinds on this hill, scarlet, white, lilac, yellow, pink, marroon [sic]: the cliffs actually bloom with them.’
No surprise then that Hooker, who was also a confidant of Charles Darwin and would succeed his…