Ben Wallace, ‘Plant hunting in Yunnan’

Ben, former horticultural botanist at Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens, will describe his recent eco-tour to Yunnan Province in China.

Ben Wallace has been keenly interested in plant life since childhood, becoming particularly fascinated with epiphytes and their way of life without direct access to the soil. This eventually led him to study them at postgraduate level, completing a 500 page thesis entitled The Australian Vascular Epiphytes: flora and ecology' for which he was admitted to the degree of  Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Science, Department of Botany at the University of New England.
Ben first went to Yunnan in 1990 as the Horticultural Botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney and was overwhelmed at the plant diversity there. He has led tours to Yunnan annually since 1995. He was Director of Living Collections at the ANBG throughout the nineties, and since then a consultant in Horticultural Botany and Plant Ecology, and tour operator.