Writing in 'The Garden' in 1998, Roy Lancaster says:
" Writing to the famous German botanist and respected botanical historian, Emil Bretschneider in 1898, Augustine Henry, the Irish Physician and plant explorer, admitted that he had
no real idea of the number of species he had collected in China. Hazarding a guess, he suggested a total of around 5,000 - many of them new to science.
Henry was stationed at Ichang on the Yangtze river, just below the Yantze gorges, from 1882-1889. He was employed by the Imperial Chinese Maritime Service and,
though he was later stationed elsewhere in China, eventually leaving on the last day of the last year of the century, his later collections were nothing compared with those he made while
in Ichang. Although he travelled more widely during his leave periods, his collecting was mainly concentrated within a 10-mile radius of Ichang, in the gorges of the many rivers
flowing through the mountains of Hubei and nearby Sichuan into the Yangtze.
It was from one of these locations in Fang prefecture in Hubei that he sent to Kew herbarium specimens of a herbaceous perennial allied to Asarum, but distinct enough to be described
by Kew botanist Daniel Oliver as a new genus, of which Henry's plant was and remains the only species. In devising a name for it, Oliver took the initial letter from Asarum
and placed it at the end to make Saruma, while the specific epithet commemorates its discoverer.
Unfortunately, Henry did not collect and send home seed of his novelty, or if he did, nothing appears to have come of it. Its introduction to Britain was lefdt until a century later when, in 1991, a Japanese
explorer Mikinori Ogisu brought seed to England from plants he had introduced to Japan from the garden of the Wuhan Botanical Institute in May 1981.
I grew plants from this seed in pots under glass until summer 1996, when I planted one outside in a small, shady bed at the base of the north-facing wall of the house. My plant thrived to such an extent
that it survived the following winter to flourish anew last year before being cut to the ground during the cold spell in early December.
Tony Hall, of Kew's Alpine Unit, says that, unlike Asarum, Saruma flowers seem to be self-compatible, producing viable seed which germinates easily.
Another difference from Asarum is its terminal or pseudo-terminal flowers with conspicuous petals. Asarum petals are reduced and minute if not absent altogether,
their role being undertaken by the trilobed petaloid calyx. Saruma differs most obviously from Asarum in its upright, leafy stems.
In the wild in China, Saruma enjoys a wide distribution in the provinces of Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, Shaanxi, Gansu, Sichuan and Guizhou, where it occurs between 600 and 1600m
(2,000 and 5,250ft) in deciduous woodland, especially in damp places. According to Ogisu, in some areas the roots and rootstock of Saruma are used as a medicine
to treat stomach ache, while its leaves are commonly eaten by the larvae of a butterfly, Luebdorsia longicaudata.
Cambridge University Botanical Garden say online:
"Saruma henryi, or upright wild ginger, is a shade-loving herbaceous perennial from China, where it grows in forests, valleys and streamsides.
Although this species occurs in several provinces of central China, it is registered as being endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, due to habitat loss and population fragmentation.
S. henryi forms a mound to 60cm in height, and spreads either by creeping roots, or by seed.
Individual tri-petalled, yellow flowers, produced sporadically through summer, are borne in the leaf axils, and the downy, cordate leaves release a ginger-like scent when bruised.
The species honours Augustine Henry (1857-1930), a plant collector for the Royal Botanic Garden Kew, who spent 20 years botanising and collecting in central China."
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