Life is full of mysteries...Serendipity is an operative principle of the world.

Your guess is as good as mine!

 I photographed this on a steep slope with limestone outcrops (some almost forming a wall) on June 16, 2018 in the vicinity of Napahai--a beautiful lake not far from "Shangri-La" formerly known as Zhong Dian (中甸县). This was on a trip to the mountains of northern Yunnan sponsored by the North American Rock Garden Society (prompted by Harry Jans: be made us do it!)...I promptly forgot about this--and was only reminded a year ago when I wrote a blog post about gesneriads...wherein I noticed the plant above. Or rather, I noticed another specimen of the same taxon growing on the same cliff. Since I know you were too lazy to click on the hyperlink I reproduce the picture below:

Corallodiscus lanuginosus (left) and mystery plant (right)

I didn't think at the time that I'd taken any other pictures of the plant...and would have left it at that (supposing it was Sinocrassula that is). I have a pretty hefty library of Plants of China at home--I have a hunch this mystery plant may be featured somewhere in one of those books--but life gets hectic, and I dropped the thread. I have a sliver of time today--perhaps I'll sleuth through my floras and see if I can determine the species (unless one of you beat me to the punch and put it in a comment below: it's a race!) But this post isn't just about this charismatic little rock plant altogether. It's about serendipity....I wouldn't have posted the picture above a year ago had Vojtech Holubec not contributed seed of Coralodiscus lanuginosus to the NARGS seed exchanget--a plant that has haunted me much of my life. That contribution resulted in my blog post. Eventually life moved on.

Daphne calcicola at Adrian and Samantha Cooper's mind boggling garden

Then yesterday David and Jan Palmer--extraordinary plantspeople from Portland--came for a visit and brought with them a beautiful plant of a yellow Yunnanese daphne, D. aurantiaca to be exact, David brought the plant back from Yunnan--not far from where I saw it myself in 1999 when I went to China my first time to visit the extraordinary World Horticultural Exposition, which I have blogged about before in one of my longest and best blog posts, which you (no doubt) also missed! But I digress!

Androsace bulleyana (front) and Daphne calcicola (back) just outside Napahai Botanic Garden.

The Palmer's wonderful gift, and our conversation about David's expedition to Yunnan (at practically the same time as my first trip!) got me to thinking about my own twisted and wonderful experience with the yellow daphnes: I actually saw Daphne aurantiaca in 1999 growing in a woodland not far from Lijiang in the submontane (had to use that word--it was Word of the Day yesterday) of the Jade Dragon Mountains.

Daphne aurantiaca in the Cooper garden

Somewhere in my vast, unscanned library transparencies, (I linked a website that explains what those are--since they are rapidly becoming as antique as magic lanterns) I have a slide image of Daphne aurantiaca I took on that magical mountain 26 years ago. I have been pretty obsessed with yellow daphnes ever since--as I have with Corallodiscus and several thousand other plants come to think of it. The Palmers gave me a plant of this LAST Thanksgiving weekend--which I hope is still in our greenhouses at work (must check), but I shall monitor this one with eagle eyes and hope to plant it out in what I hope will be a magical spot next April...we'll see...

What this post is REALLY about is the mystery of cognition, and recognition. We are bombarded with so many stimuli, and most of us are juggling so many balls that we drop quite a few. All the time. But if you live long enough, you may eventually realize you photographed a stunning mysterious plant on a cliff in Yunnan you forgot about. But 7 years later you snap to attention and make it a priority to figure out!

And I realized also that the day on Napahai was one of the most magical and fantastic days in my long and very lucky life. I've never got around to blogging about it, but I shall make up for that in the coming weeks! My only celebration of the Coopers' garden (which I have been so lucky to visit not one but twice in May!) was to blog about their cactus greenhouse. That would be like visiting Denver Botanic Gardens and only noticing the Christmas lights, he said sardonically.

Sometimes fate has to nudge us again and again to make us snap to attention. Out of this little cluster of coincidences, I have a hunch some pretty cool things may transpire...

Come ride with me to Serendip (not Sri Lanka, btw, but to another land of discovery!).