324 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
REPORT OF WORK IN 1915 IN KANSU AND TIBET.* 
By Reginald Farrar. 
On March 28, 1915, the Expedition, in the same personnel, set out 
from Lanchow, north-west for Si-ning. This is all a rolling loess 
country of crumpled, high, bare downs, perfectly lifeless and barren, 
of uniform pale-ochre yellow as far as eye can see, but for stretches 
of cultivation and Zizyphus-orchards in the stony levels of the river- 
valley ; — take it all in all, as drear and forbidding a desert-region as 
you need wish to avoid, blasted with a burning summer, and blighted 
with the iron cold of a long, hard winter. Si-ning, the capital of the 
Border, and seat of the Viceroyalty of the Koko-nor, lies flat beside 
the Si-ning Hor, just before the right-angled intersection of four 
broad vales, hemmed in with low, arid convolutions of the loess fells. 
Only very far away in the south appear the Alps of the Kweite-Salar 
ranges, not visible from the town itself : the westward distance is 
closed by highlands running up to the ridges below the Koko-nor ; 
and in the north, here and there over the intervening hogs' -backs of 
the hills, peer in April points of snow that alone suggest the presence 
of the Da-Tung chain. 
In Si-ning a month was passed, amid the first luxuriance of the 
peach-blossom, and the unparalleled splendour of Viburnum fragrans 
in every yard of temple and palace and humblest cottage court. 
And on May 3 we set out for the mountains, hoping the season might 
by now be sufficiently awakened. The journey into the foothills of 
the Da-Tung Alps takes two long days, up through the same arid 
loess country ,with the mountains ahead of you all the time as you 
proceed slowly along the dust-dry valley of the Wei Yuan Pu Hor. 
A golden Adonis at one point and a single clump of Iris Tigridia alone 
relieved the desolation in the first week of May. Very gradually the 
distance rises and rises all the way, from the starting-point of more 
than seven thousand feet in Si-ning, so that one has no notion of 
being at any considerable height at all ; and the mountains, rising 
only some five or six thousand feet from the ten-thousand feet of 
their foothills, seem mere inconsiderable fells, above an undulating 
upland plain that might be at sea-level for all you can tell. But 
at Wei-yuan Pu, snuggled down among poplars in the convergent 
branches of the beck, under the projecting downs that sweep out 
upon the uplands from the Alps, you come at length upon loam and 
dark strata of vegetable soil, to break the infinite monotony of the 
loess, veiled as it is, over all this region, in solid miles of Iris ensata 
* For explorations of 191 4 see p. 47. 
