Taiwan Expedition Log

August 9-29, 2008
September 5, 2008 update

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Friday August 15, 2008

Armed with that information and a bright sunshiny sky, we were off in the hope we could indeed make it to our next destination. As we dropped to lower elevations, rice fields were the order of the day, growing in the rich bottomland ... even in the massive river beds, which get washed away with each large rain. As we finally started to rise again in elevation, the soils along our route morphed from a rich organic soil in the bottomlands to a soil ... and I use the term loosely, composed almost entirely of broken slate. How the farmers grow crops in this soil is truly baffling ... I never want to hear any more complaints about red clay after seeing what the farmers battle here. The irrigation was equally as fascinating as water was flying in virtually every field. Instead of burying irrigation pipes, the pipes were just laid along the roads and then bundled together in groups of 50-100 and strung across rivers alongside the bridges. Obviously, freezing weather was not a concern at these elevations. After climbing through agricultural fields for hours, most of which were used for cabbage production, we finally cleared the production area and returned to forested roadsides. Having passed through so many cabbage fields, it was obvious that this area either didn't experience hot humid summer days or the nights were quite cool.

As we passed the town of Nanshan, we realized the roads were indeed as bad as we had heard. Entire sections of the road had simply slid off into the river bed below. Our first major detour took us out into the river bed where a temporary road had been carved amongst the giant boulders. The immense scale of both the mountains, boulders, and the river bed made cars look like children's toys to those watching from above. After we wove our way past the missing highway sections, the roads climbed higher as we finally reached the outskirts of the Shei Pa National Park, and the windy mountain roads that lead up to Wuling Farm.

Here, on Highway 7, we made our first stop of the day at 5,400' elevation. We wandered off down the hill at one of the car pull-offs to find a horticultural richness beyond our wildest expectations. The overstory was one of evergreen oaks including a long-leaf cyclobalanopsis. Underneath Fatsia polycarpa were growing including some that stretched over 30' tall. The vegetation changed as we walked horizontally around the mountain with each change of directional exposure. On one exposure were asarums, while on the other side, there were large clumps of Rohdea wantanabe interspersed with budded calanthe orchids. The understory was littered with Ardisia crenata, indicating at best, a Zone 8 climate.

The ferns here were also fabulous, which was to be the story over the entire trip. One side of the mountain was filled with Polystichum tripteron (which we already grow from a Japan source), Dryopteris crassirhizoma, and variegated coniogramme fern, also like the ones we sell from China. More of the Asplenium nidus like we saw at Yang Ming Shan were here also, but at a higher elevation of 2,000'. Brown-stiped polystichums and giant 6'-tall diplaziums accompanied a dizzying array of epiphytic ferns including pyrrosia, lepisorus, microsorium, and arachniodes. One microsorium is identical to the plant sold in the US as crocodile fern, while one pteris-ish fern had dazzling 4'-long fronds. The wood edges were home to other cool plants including Liquidambar formosana, Tetrapanax papyrifera, Eriobotrya deflexa, and Phytolacca japonica ... the asian counterpart of our native pokeweed. Everything at this site was amazing including the bizarre tree-growing shelf fungus. Did I mention the deafiningly-loud cicadas?

We began dropping slightly in elevation as we continued toward our hotel. We turned off the main Highway 7 on to Wuling Farm Road, aka Highway 124. Our first stop at 5,800' elevation was when Mark spotted a clump of Pyrrosia polydactyla with extraordinarily long central lobes, growing near the Police Station.

Just down the road, we stopped again, this time in a wet which cove, which led to jumps of joy as we spotted a 4' tall paris in full seed. This, and nearby areas would prove rich with paris, both the large species, probably P. chinensis and a smaller 2'-tall species, probably P. bockiana, which was often found with both dark purple stems and silver-veined leaves. Surprisingly, while the seed pods were still green, the seeds inside were bright red.

We had seen lots of Fatsia polycarpa near Taiping Shan, which was truly hard to distinguish from typical F. japonica, but the plants here near Wuling Farm, which were often intertwined with fruiting schisandra vines, were quite different. The lobes on these plants were much more narrow and deeply cut, compared to anything we had seen earlier in the trip. From underneath the fatsia emerged the 10'-long fronds of Asparagus cochinchinensis, which were quite different than my Korean accessions under that name. There were other interesting plants we spotted here, including our first and only sighting of Aucuba japonica. Underneath the aucuba were huge clumps of Podophyllum pleianthum along with two different cyrtomium (holly fern) species, C. macrophyllum and what appeared to a very glossy form of C. falcatum. The polystichum with pewter new growth was also quite striking, as were the terrestrial lepisorus and clumps of Pyrrosia sheari with 20"-long fronds ... beyond amazing.

There was another arisaema quite prevalent in this location, whose leaves were gone, but the remining seed stalk was perched on a 1" stalk just above the ground. As we climbed back up the hill, we passed many more interesting plants including another mahonia, more superb ferns, and our first sighting of the Taiwanese Syneilesis subglabrata. Certainly the most memorable plants here were what appears to be a narrow-leaved version of Clematis armandii. One clone in a patch of solid green-leaved plants had superb silver leaf markings ... a real gem.

Only a few kilometers remained before we paid our entrance toll and entered Wuling Farm. Wuling Farm is a former commercial farm located in the Hoping Township at the southeastern entrance of the Shei-Pa National Park, turned tourist attraction. Wuling Farm is a glacial river valley surrounded by mountains including Chihyou Mountain, Pintian Mountain, Buhsiulan Mountain, Tsomido Mountain, and Syue Mountain (2nd highest peak in Taiwan), all of which are cloud forest habitats. Shei-Pa National Park is divided into vegetation zones based on elevation. The Lower Quercus zone runs from 4,500' to 6,000' and includes cyclobalanopsis, litsea, and pasania. The Upper Quercus zone runs from 6,000' to 7,500' and includes other cyclobalanopsis species combined with conifers. From 7,500' to 9,400' is the Tsuga-Picea zone, including Tsuga chinesnsis and Picea morrisonicola. Wuling Farm is also home to the glacial relict Formosan landlocked Salmon, who had their route to the ocean sealed off in the last ice age.

We were anxious to see what our room at the Wuling Farm Hostel would be like. We had already experienced the translation problem with Chinese names, where the spelling changes with the different types of translation used. The same was true with our hostel, which turned out instead to be a hotel. Wuling Farm was one of the few places I was able to book myself from North Carolina, thanks to the email help from the Wuling Farm manager, Howard Huang, who came out to greet us when we arrived. Howard is a native Tai, who studied hotel management in England. I strongly commend him for his understanding that service is a huge part of hotel management. Coughing and nearly gagging, we made our way inside past the huge pots of incense at the front door, which is used to ward off the biting (they proudly displayed a well-used piece of fly paper at the front desk to let us know what it would be like if they didn't burn the incense. Howard escorted us to our second floor room which he had saved just for us due to its proximity to their wireless Internet access point. We were assigned a dinner time to access the buffet, which we found out later is done to stagger folks like us from the huge number of tour groups visiting Wuling Farm. The dinner buffet was quite extravagant ... far more than we could have ever imagined, complete with a self-serve ice cream cabinet with an array of delicious flavors.