Date of Birth - 1873

From an early age Forrest was attracted to wild places. He spent a lot of time on the hills and moors near his home in Kilmarnock. Leaving school he worked as a chemist, handling dried plants used in herbal cures, this gave him a little medical knowledge. He used a small inheritance to travel to Australia in 1891 where he worked in goldfields and spent some time on a sheep station.

A chance happening of finding a coffin in the banks of Gladhouse Loch got him in contact with the museums in Edinburgh and he met Prof. Balfour Regis Keeper at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh - who gave him a job in the herbarium. 1903 he met a cotton broker who offered Forrest the chance to collect plants in China. He went to the high plateau’s and mountain ranges of NW Yunnan and SE Tibet collecting many new and rare alpines. He worked in dense forests of pine and hardwood trees to smaller shrubs Rhododendron, Clematis - finding Clematis chrysocoma and C. forrestii. It was a plant hunters paradise. The hillsides were covered in a mass of shrubs: Rubus sp., Dipelta sp., Viburnum sp., Spiraea sp., Philadelphus sp., Deutzia sp., Styrax sp., Illicium sp., Ligustrum sp., Berberis sp., Buddleia sp., Benthamia sp., Kerria sp., Camellia sp., Magnolia sp. and Hydrangea sp. On the grasslands he found Anemone sp., Primula sp. , Gentian sp., Potentilla sp. and Aster sp. and on the high limestone ridges he found some of the finest rhododendron species -incl. Rhododendron souliei, Rh. sulfureum, Rh. crassum, Rh. bullatum.

In 1905 he was based in the mountain ranges of NW Yunnan. The area was in a state of unrest between lamas, Tibetans and British with Chinese trying to get established in the area. Forrest continued to work with his team assembling 1000s of specimens, seeds, bulbs and photographs. When the situation worsened his Tibetan helpers deserted him and he ended up trying to defend a Catholic Mission against a large number of armed lamas. Eventually he had to flee and his group was massacred, bar Forrest and one other. He was pursued for days over high mountain terrain then finally given refuge in a small Tibetan Village from where he was smuggled to safety crossing glaciers and snow fields. He had lost a whole seasons work - but had at least survived. Rather than returning home he continued to collect throughout the region.

Forrest made many more journeys to China covering a total period of 28 years. During his second expedition in 1910 he was ordered to leave for Burma due to further unrest. He eventually returned to south Yunnan . By 1912 he was working on a wholesale scale with a staff of twenty Chinese collectors and sent back two hundred pounds of seed in nearly six hundred species.

Countries visited: China, Burma, Tibet

Awards: FLS 1924, VMH 1921, VMM 1927

George Forrest Main Plant Introductions:

• Abies forestii
• Acer wardii
• Camellia reticulata
• Cotoneaster lacteus
• Daphne aurantiaca
• Hypericum forrestii
• Iris chrysographes
• Jasminum polyanthum
• Osmanthus yunnanensis
• Pieris formosa var forestii
• Primula aurantiaca
• Primula melanops
• Primula vialii
• Rhododendron campylogynum
• Rhododendron crinigerum
• Rhododendron griersonianum
• Rhododendron neriiflorum
• Rhododendron sinogrande
• Tsuga forestii