By Maria Bregman
A lily, a broken leg and a museum walking out into a garden: what Manchester’s Museum Beyond the Walls says about how knowledge moves from hand to hand.
Ernest Wilson was an English botanist and plant collector who in 1910, during his travels in the Min River valley of western Sichuan, was badly injured by falling rocks, one of which broke his leg. He had the leg fixed with a makeshift splint made from his own camera tripod, and it took three days for his assistants to carry him back. He limped for the rest of his life and called it his “lily limp”: he had gone back to the valley to collect bulbs of the regal lily, which he had discovered there earlier, in 1903.
The flower survived. It can be found in gardens of England and America, and almost nobody caring for it knows anything about the Min River and the tripod. Ernest Wilson collected over 65,000 specimens for herbaria and introduced about 2,000 plants to the West in the four journeys he undertook in China. He called his book on China China, Mother of Gardens.
What fascinates me in this story is not the heroism but the loss. The plant came with everything intact – roots and smell included. What else did it bring? A Latin name, a date of collection, a place of collection. Everything that was known about it by the people living beside it for three thousand years remained on the other side of the river.
What can be placed on a herbarium sheet
One of the largest herbaria in Great Britain is preserved in Manchester Museum. It includes about 750 thousand specimens, according to the museum itself. The herbarium has existed since 1860 and was created not by academics but by Manchester merchants and amateurs. James Cosmo Melvill presented his herbarium in 1904, Leopold Grindon in 1910, Charles Bailey in 1917. Plants collected by Darwin during his journey on the Beagle are present in the herbarium. Among the specimens from China are some sheets collected by Augustine Henry, an Irish customs official and doctor who worked in Yichang between 1882 and 1889. Out of boredom he started collecting the plants of the area, and eventually sent over 15,000 dried specimens to Kew. By 1896 they had yielded 500 new species and 25 new genera.
According to the materials of the project presented below, the Manchester herbarium contains about 2,500 Chinese specimens from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A herbarium specimen is honest and economical. It consists of a flat pressed plant and a label. A herbarium specimen does not contain the meaning of a plant. The plum on the herbarium specimen is Prunus mume. The plum painted on a Kangxi-period Chinese vase held in the same museum is endurance: it blooms in winter, long before any other flower; its five petals symbolise five blessings. Together with the orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum, the plum makes up the “four noble plants”; together with pine and bamboo, it makes the “three friends of winter”, the image of a scholar who does not bend. The plum has been cultivated in China for more than three thousand years.
The two objects located in one building describe one and the same plant in two different languages, and neither of the languages can be translated into the other without loss. There are several floors between them and a century and a half of the custom of separating “nature” from “culture”.
The gallery in which it all started
In April 2023, following a major redevelopment, Manchester Museum opened the Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery, which became the first permanent gallery of Chinese culture in the museum’s history. Its layout is itself an answer to the same question. Alongside embroidery, jade and a scroll twenty metres long, depicting the birthday of the Kangxi Emperor, there is a stuffed specimen of the milu deer. In China, the milu had become extinct by 1900; but the species survived thanks to the Duke of Bedford, who saved the remaining animals on his English estate, and then in the 1980s their descendants were brought back to China, where there are thousands of them today. This is not zoology but an allegory of something which was once preserved in foreign lands and was eventually returned.
The purpose of the gallery was expressed by its benefactor, Dr Lee Kai Hung, in the form of one chain of thought, which starts with these words: “If there is no dialogue, there is no understanding”. He follows this with trust, harmony and peace.
The thread
It was in this gallery that the curator and artist Katerina Karp launched the project Threads of Connection. The first stage concerned textiles. Second-year students of the School of Digital Arts (SODA) of Manchester Metropolitan University took five items from the gallery, including a Qing dynasty dragon robe, shoes for bound feet and a “smart” firefighter’s jacket with sensors created by Professor Henry Yi Li of the University of Manchester, and transformed them into their own language – digital stories and 3D textiles made with the Print City lab. These works were exhibited in the museum in December 2025.
Museum Beyond the Walls – the second stage – makes a move which appears obvious only in retrospect. Peonies, plums, lotuses, bamboo, pines, osmanthus, chrysanthemums and orchids bloom on the robes, vases and embroidered pictures. On the floor above, the same plants are kept in herbarium folders. And a few miles away from the museum they grow alive.
The Yangzhou Scholars’ Garden opened its doors at RHS Garden Bridgewater, Salford, on 26 September 2026 – according to the RHS, the heart of Britain’s biggest Chinese garden. It took more than eight years to build, in collaboration with the city of Yangzhou and the Chinese community of Greater Manchester. There are four wooden pavilions, constructed by Chinese craftsmen, that are meant for the four scholarly pursuits: music, chess, calligraphy and painting. There are over two hundred trees and shrubs and nearly four thousand perennials planted around the pond. Inlaid in the paving is a mosaic of the same three friends of winter.
This is the place where the thread pulls tight. The image painted on silk, the dry leaf in the folder and the living tree are three states of one body of knowledge. For the first time in over a century and a half, all three can be reached within one day.
A plant you can hear
SODA students brought their sensors to this garden for an experiment. It all begins with an almost childlike question: What happens when a plant becomes a source of sound? Signals of a living plant are transformed into sound material and electronic music.
It would be easy to think of it as a carnival performance. But let’s see where it happens: next to a music pavilion, in a garden modelled on those where a learned man used to sit with his qin amid pines and plums, listening to the garden as he might read. Students with their sensors, knowingly or not, repeat the ancient gesture on a modern instrument. Technology serves not as the goal but as a means to bring attention back. We are accustomed to seeing a plant; we are being asked to hear it.
From the physical garden there comes a digital one, where photograph, botanical illustration, museum piece, sound and commentary coexist. The project does not promise a finished display: unfinished works, discussions with students and specialists, and visitors’ questions remain open. It presents itself not as an exhibition but as an evolving network of relationships.
Who is the author now?
This openness comes at a cost, and it needs to be spelled out clearly. Every time a custodian hands over knowledge to a student and a visitor contributes something new, the original meaning inevitably changes. Any handing over is a form of translation; any translation is an act of losing as much as gaining. The dragon robe on display in Manchester doesn’t mean the same thing any more as it did when worn by an official. The plum tree blossoms in a different landscape in Salford.
However, the other option is well known, and it is there in the herbarium cabinets: a perfectly preserved sample, but no one left to ask about it. Wilson took the lily back with him, and all that was known about it remained behind in the mountains. It has taken more than a century, the Chinese residents of Manchester, craftsmen from Yangzhou and second-year students with sensors for people who know how to read the plant to stand beside it again.
And where does knowledge reside? Neither in the object nor in the folder: there it lies dormant. It resides in the moment when a person takes the object and wonders about its meaning, and there is a person around who knows how to provide the answer. A museum beyond the walls is not a museum that has carried its exhibits out into the street. Rather, it is a museum that recognises that preserving and handing on are two separate kinds of work, and has taken up the second.
After all, the thread was not spun to rest in a box.
