On the morning when heavy rains washed away the cliffs of the back mountain, Lao Hei squatted at the cave-in with a rusty grafting knife in his hand, and stroked the exposed plant roots with his fingertips - that was the most secret lifeblood of the botanical garden that he had guarded for forty years. The distant niece Maura, whom she had not contacted for thirty years, appeared at this moment, her jacket covered in mud, holding an order from the Transnational Botanical Research Institute in her hand to transform this "private vegetable garden" covering an area of 100 acres into a standardized gene bank.
Next to the fence where Eupatorium grows wildly, the two confront each other head-on for the first time. Lao Hei pointed at the new grafted wild lychee variety and stroked the trunk with his rough palm: "Plants recognize people. You can't grow roots with morning dew in an incubator." Maura opened the tablet and called up the endangered species database: "Uncle, the three plush honey locust plants you saved are only 17 left in the world. Only in the laboratory can they really survive."
When the exotic species Mikania micrantha spread along the irrigation canals, when the dark shadows digging wild orchids in the middle of the night startled the night herons who were roosting, and when Maura discovered that Lao Hei's notebook contained more detailed phenological records than any other paper - next to the flowering times marked with pencils, there were drawn the growth curve of the magnolia she planted when she was a child. The planting philosophies of the two eras collided and blended in the steaming greenhouse. Finally, in a cold wave that had never happened in a century, they worked side by side to use the most primitive straw covering method to protect the rare seedlings that could not be replaced by the gene bank.
