So there you are - a budding plant-hunter on your second expedition - in a historic camp in Tibet, the same camp where the great planthunters Ludlow and Sheriff pitched their tents 50 years ago. It should be a moment engraved on your memory for the rest of your life. And it is - because you have never, ever been so cold before. The temperature has been falling and falling, and the Tibetan Sherpas and porters whom you hired to carry your stuff, including your tents and your warm woollies, have not appeared.
Encased in an emergency blanket - which at 2,800 metres and 10 degrees Celsius is near useless - you catch a wink or two of sleep. But you have to be shaken awake by your fellow travellers because your frozen feet are almost in the fire. Eventually the next morning, after you have woken to find your jacket glistening with white frost, the rest of the entourage arrives. "We had to give the ponies a break", they apologise, looking sheepish - and suspiciously warm and rested.
But the occasion is also engraved on your memory for happier reasons, because, while moseying around at the camp, idly collecting berberis seed, you stumble across a paeony, its pods filled with unmistakable, livid blue seeds. It can only be Paeonia sterniana, preciously rare in the wild, thanks to the questing snouts of hungry pigs. And, in cultivation only a few plants exist - none of these in Ireland. It was first collected in the 1940s at the same place, by Ludlow and Sheriff, who named it after Frederick Claude Stern, a noted paeony enthusiast.
Fortuitously - for you, if not for the paeony - the pigs have uprooted seedlings, so you can bag these and add them to the list in the little yellow book that holds the records of your collections.
In the greenhouse of Beech Park House, Clonsilla, where he has been head gardener since last May, Seamus O'Brien tells his story, yellow book in one hand and paeony pot in the other. Just returned from his month in Tibet and Nepal, the 26-year-old adventurer is tired and weather-worn - but very, very happy. In a cool room in the basement of the house, 554 bags of seeds are drying: there are several different species of anemone, clematis, meconopsis, primula, corydalis, lily, gentian, edelweiss, rhodiola and other high-altitude plants. Some of the seed was gathered at nearly 5,000 metres, and most was collected around the Tsangpo, the upper part of the Brahmaputra River that flows eastward through Tibet.
The seed of Michelia velutina, which has never been cultivated in Ireland, was collected over the Tsangpo River, with the nimble Seamus (the youngest and only Irish member of the British expedition) hanging out of the branches while the water gushed beneath. Michelia is closely related to the magnolia genus, and its acquisition will please Seamus's employer, Neil McDermot, a keen magnolia man.
The botanical expedition - only the second to go to Tibet since the Chinese takeover in 1950 - was a time packed with new discoveries and introductions. New species, entirely unknown to science, of sorbus and birch were discovered, and for the first time seed of Rhododendron bulu was brought out of Tibet. It was also the first time (and the last, they hoped) that the expeditioners ate bear meat - although last year, in Yunnan province Seamus had dined on equally-difficult, deep-fried wasps and their larvae.
The most important thing that Seamus brought home was another first for Ireland. The seed of the beautiful, felt-lined Rhododen- dron lanatoides was collected only once before, by Frank KingdonWard in 1924, and from that grew just three plants, all in Britain. This time round, as well as seed, the group was able to collect two seedlings: one went to "a builder called Ralph", while the other was brought back to Beech Park by Seamus.
Not all of Seamus O'Brien's collections will remain at Beech Park: orchid seed has already been dispatched to Brendan Sayers, the orchid man at the Botanic Garens, Glasnevin, and rhododendron seed will be propagated there also, to be grown on in Kilmacurragh, Co Wicklow. Those rhododendrons that do not require acid conditions will be installed at the arboretum in Beech Park, which is presently being refurbished.
To all those readers wondering if this could be the Beech Park garden made famous by two generations of the Shackleton family, and which was sold to an unnamed buyer a couple of years ago - the answer is yes. It is the same Beech Park, with its dreamy walled garden, full of bountiful, beautiful plant life. And in the safe and considerate hands of the McDermot family, its fate is secure, as you'll be able to see some time next year when it opens to the public.
Diary Date: Today 10 a.m.-3 p.m.: Christmas Bazaar at the Royal Hospital, Donnybrook. The plant stall is supplied with choice plants by some of Dublin's top gardeners.