The Specimen That Started Everything
Evelyn Tsang still remembers the leaf. It was 2014, and she had wandered into a plant stall at the Flower Market on a Sunday morning — “the kind of visit where you tell yourself you’re just looking” — when she saw it: a begonia with leaves the colour of a bruised aubergine, each one no larger than a Hong Kong dollar coin, covered in tiny silver spots that caught the fluorescent light like a scatter of foil. Begonia amphioxus. The vendor, a man who had been selling orchids in that same stall for thirty years, watched her stare at it for a full two minutes before saying, in the flat tone of someone who has seen this before: “That one’s trouble.”
She bought it anyway. It died within six weeks.
What happened next — what has happened to a great many people who have stumbled into the genus Begonia — is that she bought another one. And then another. And then she joined a Facebook group. And then, as these stories tend to go, she found herself eight years later standing in the humid half-light of a limestone forest in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, holding a begonia leaf the size of a dinner plate, trying not to cry.
Tsang, now forty-three, is Hong Kong’s most prominent begonia collector — a descriptor she dislikes, partly because it sounds competitive (collecting, she insists, is not a sport), and partly because she knows the number she would have to disclose: over three hundred distinct species and cultivars, housed in a purpose-built shade house on the rooftop of her Sai Kung village house, with a further forty or so in terrariums in her study because, in her words, “some of them needed to be closer to me.” Her collection is not the largest in Asia — that honour likely belongs to a grower in Taiwan whose operation runs to several thousand — but it is almost certainly the most carefully documented private begonia collection in Hong Kong. Every plant has a label, a provenance note, a photograph taken on the day of acquisition, and a record of every repotting, every pest treatment, every leaf it has dropped and every flower it has produced. She keeps these records in a series of Moleskine notebooks, in fountain pen, because “a spreadsheet feels like work, and this is not work.”
This is not work. It is, depending on which begonia grower you ask, a vocation, a compulsion, a form of madness, or the most satisfying relationship a person can have with the natural world. It is also, increasingly, a cultural phenomenon. In the past five years, begonia collecting has moved from the margins of specialist horticulture — the domain of botanical garden curators and retired botanists — into the mainstream of plant enthusiasm. Instagram accounts dedicated to begonias regularly attract tens of thousands of followers. Rare specimens change hands for sums that would buy a decent second-hand car. A single leaf of Begonia darthvaderiana, the so-called “Darth Vader begonia” whose near-black foliage and blood-red reverse made it the most coveted houseplant of 2020, once sold at auction for over HK$15,000 — and the buyer was not a botanical institution but a twenty-seven-year-old software engineer in Quarry Bay who kept it in a repurposed IKEA cabinet.
Why Begonias, Of All Things
This is the question Tsang gets most often, usually from people standing in her shade house, looking slightly overwhelmed by the sheer variety of foliage on display. Why not orchids, which at least have the decency to produce dramatic flowers? Why not succulents, which reward neglect? Why a genus that contains nearly two thousand species — more than any other flowering plant genus except Astragalus — with forms ranging from the ankle-high to the tree-sized, from the arid-adapted to the fully aquatic, from the foliage so plain it could be a weed to the foliage so spectacular it looks computer-generated?
“Because,” she says, without hesitation, “they are the most architecturally varied leaves in the plant kingdom, and I am interested in leaves.”
This is the key to understanding begonia people: they are not flower people. The flowers of most begonia species are modest things — small, usually white or pink, and in the case of the female flowers, accompanied by a winged ovary that is interesting but not conventionally beautiful. Begonia people are foliage people, which is to say they are people who have trained themselves to see what most gardeners overlook. A begonia leaf can be symmetrical or asymmetrical (the genus name honours Michel Bégon, a seventeenth-century French governor of Saint-Domingue, but the plants themselves are defined by their asymmetry — one side of the leaf always larger than the other, a trait that makes them instantly identifiable once you learn to see it). It can be smooth as lacquer or covered in hairs so fine they refract light into a halo. It can be green, silver, pink, red, purple, near-black, or some combination that defies colour naming. The leaf of Begonia pavonina, the “peacock begonia” from the montane forests of Malaysia, appears iridescent blue when photographed with flash — not because of pigment but because of microscopic structures in the leaf surface called iridoplasts that manipulate light wavelengths, a trick evolved to maximise photosynthesis in the deep shade of the forest floor.
“Everyone who comes here asks about the blue one,” Tsang says. “They’ve seen it on Instagram. I have to tell them it looks green in normal light. Most of them are disappointed. The ones who aren’t — those are the ones I invite back.”
Her collection is organised not by genus — that would be too broad, since everything here is Begonia — but by geography and growth habit. One bench holds the Malaysians: the jewel-like Begonia rajah, whose leaves look as though they have been dusted with powdered malachite; the sprawling Begonia burkillii, whose silver-pink foliage earned it the common name “silver butterfly”; and the impossibly delicate Begonia hoehneana, a miniature species whose entire plant could fit in a teacup. Another holds the South Americans: the cane-stemmed begonias whose bamboo-like canes can reach two metres in a season and whose leaves, in the case of Begonia maculata, are olive green with silver spots arranged as precisely as if they had been applied with a stencil. A third bench holds the Africans: the rhizomatous species whose leaves emerge directly from thick, creeping rhizomes that snake across the surface of the potting mix like alien tentacles.
And then there are the terrariums. Begonias from cloud forests, from limestone karsts, from the perpetually wet understorey of equatorial jungles — species that cannot survive in the ambient humidity of Hong Kong, which might sound absurd given that Hong Kong’s summer humidity routinely exceeds ninety percent, but which makes sense when you understand that these plants have evolved in environments that are not just humid but saturated, where the air is thick enough to drink and the leaves are never, ever dry.
The Hong Kong Begonia Society: From WhatsApp Group to Institution
In 2017, Tsang did something that, in retrospect, seems inevitable: she started a WhatsApp group. “There were maybe six of us,” she recalls. “We had all met in the same Facebook group — the international begonia one — and we realised we were all in Hong Kong. So we started meeting. At first it was just coffee. Then someone brought a cutting. Then it became competitive.” She pauses. “In the best way.”
The Hong Kong Begonia Society, as it is now formally known, has grown from that six-person chat to an organisation of over two hundred members. They meet monthly, usually at a member’s home or garden — “sometimes someone will host just to show off a new flowering, and we all understand” — and they maintain a shared database of over four hundred begonia species and cultivars known to be in cultivation in Hong Kong. The society runs a plant swap at every meeting (rules: no cash, no obligation to reciprocate, and you must provide written care instructions for anything you bring), and it publishes a quarterly digital newsletter called The Asymmetric Leaf, which Tsang edits in the evenings after her day job as an architectural photographer.
The society has also become, somewhat unexpectedly, a conduit between Hong Kong’s plant enthusiasts and the international begonia community. In 2023, Tsang and two other members travelled to the American Begonia Society’s annual convention in San Diego, where Tsang gave a presentation on cultivating tropical begonias in subtropical urban environments — a talk that, she says, was attended by “about forty people, most of whom had never considered that begonias could grow anywhere warmer than a greenhouse in Ohio.” The following year, the Hong Kong group hosted a visiting researcher from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who was studying the phylogenetic relationships of Asian begonia species and needed access to living material. “We took him to Tai Mo Shan,” Tsang says. “We showed him the native Hong Kong begonias. He’d seen photographs, but he’d never seen them in habitat. He was very quiet for most of the walk. Then, at the end, he said: ‘You understand that you live in one of the most important places in the world for this genus.'”
He was not exaggerating. Southeast Asia is the centre of begonia diversity — more than half of all known species occur here — and southern China, including Hong Kong and Guangdong, sits at the northern edge of this diversity hotspot. Hong Kong itself is home to at least four native begonia species, including Begonia hongkongensis, which was described as new to science only in 2005, discovered growing on a shaded stream bank in Tai Po. The fact that a new begonia species could be found in one of the most densely populated territories on Earth, in the twenty-first century, tells you something about the genus: it is both ubiquitous and overlooked, everywhere and invisible.
Field Notes: Hunting Begonias in the Wild
Tsang has been on six international begonia-hunting expeditions — the word “hunting” is the one the community uses, though no plants are killed or removed; these are photographic and observational trips, the plant equivalent of birdwatching. The destinations tell their own story: Sarawak (2018), northern Vietnam (2019), Peninsular Malaysia (2020, postponed to 2022), Sumatra (2023), southern Thailand (2024), and most recently, the karst landscapes of Guangxi (2025). Each trip has added to her notebooks, her photographs, and her understanding of what begonias are capable of becoming when left to their own evolutionary devices.
“The thing about seeing begonias in habitat,” she says, “is that it completely changes how you grow them. You think you understand a plant because you’ve kept it alive in a pot for three years. Then you see it growing on a vertical limestone face, in maybe two millimetres of moss, with water running over its roots for twelve hours a day during the monsoon and nothing at all for four months during the dry season — and you realise you don’t understand anything.”
The Guangxi trip was particularly instructive. The karst landscapes that stretch across the border between Guangdong and Guangxi provinces are one of the world’s most important limestone floras, and begonias are among the specialist plants that have evolved to thrive in this harsh, calcium-rich environment. Tsang photographed Begonia ferox — a species whose leaves are covered in raised black cones that look, depending on your frame of reference, like tiny volcanoes or the surface of a medieval mace — growing from a crack in a limestone boulder in full sun, a location so improbable that she checked the GPS coordinates twice to make sure she hadn’t made an error. “I grow mine in deep shade with eighty percent humidity,” she says. “This one was on a rock in the sun. It was completely fine. I still don’t grow mine in the sun, but I think about it constantly.”
The expeditions have also introduced her to the darker side of begonia enthusiasm. Several of the species she has seen in the wild — including Begonia darthvaderiana and the spectacular Begonia chlorosticta, whose olive-green leaves are spotted with chartreuse — are now critically endangered in habitat, partly due to habitat loss but also, increasingly, due to poaching for the horticultural trade. “It’s complicated,” she says, her tone shifting. “The plants in my collection — some of them descend from wild-collected material. I can’t pretend otherwise. But they were collected decades ago, before anyone understood the pressure. Now, when I buy a rare begonia, I only buy from growers who can document their propagation chain. Seed-grown only, or tissue culture. No wild-collected plants. And I won’t post GPS coordinates from my trips. I used to, when I was naïve. Now I know that there are people watching, people who will use that information to strip a site.”
The society maintains a position statement on ethical collecting — one of the first things every new member receives — and Tsang has become an increasingly vocal advocate for begonia conservation in a community that sometimes prioritises acquisition over preservation. “Collecting plants should feel like stewardship, not shopping,” she says. “If you can’t tell the difference, you’re in the wrong hobby.”
Growing Begonias in Hong Kong: What Actually Works
Ask Tsang for practical advice and she will give it to you in the tone of someone who has killed enough plants to have earned her opinions. The following is distilled from two hours of conversation in her shade house, edited for length but not for intensity.
On light: “No direct sun. Not ‘a little bit of morning sun.’ Not ‘dappled light.’ No. Direct. Sun. Begonia leaves burn in about twenty minutes of Hong Kong sun, and once they burn, they don’t recover — the damaged tissue is dead forever. What you want is bright shade: the kind of light you get under a tree canopy or behind a north-facing window with no curtains. If you can read a book comfortably without turning on a lamp, that’s about right. If you can feel the sun on your skin, move the plant.”
On water: “The number one cause of begonia death in Hong Kong is not underwatering. It is root rot from overwatering, compounded by the fact that most people use potting mix straight from the bag, which is designed to hold water, which is the last thing a begonia in Hong Kong’s humidity needs. My standard mix is roughly equal parts coco coir, perlite, and orchid bark, with a handful of crushed horticultural charcoal. It drains like a sieve. That’s intentional. Water thoroughly — until it runs out the bottom — and then wait until the top centimetre of the mix is dry before watering again. In summer, that might be every two or three days. In winter, once a week. Use your finger, not a schedule.”
On humidity: “This is where people overcomplicate things. Yes, begonias evolved in humid environments. No, you do not need a humidifier running twenty-four hours a day. Most cane-stemmed and rhizomatous begonias will adapt to ambient Hong Kong humidity if you acclimate them slowly. The ones that won’t — the true cloud-forest species, the tiny terrarium begonias — put them in a terrarium. Not a cloche, not a humidity tray, not a ‘pebble tray’ which is horticultural theatre and does nothing. A sealed or nearly-sealed container with a transparent lid. I use glass aquariums with glass tops, and I open them once a week for air exchange. It is not Instagram-pretty but the plants are alive.”
On feeding: “Quarter-strength balanced fertiliser, every second watering during the growing season. That’s March through October here. Stop entirely from November to February. Begonias are not heavy feeders, and overfertilising produces soft, leggy growth that attracts every pest in the postcode. If you must use slow-release pellets, use half the recommended amount. Better yet, don’t.”
The Culture of Collecting: Why We Accumulate Living Things
There is a version of this story that is only about begonias. That version would end here, with a list of recommended species and a care sheet. But Tsang’s begonia collection is also a lens through which to examine something larger: the human impulse to gather, classify, and cultivate the natural world, and what that impulse says about us.
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” she says, sitting on a wooden stool in her shade house, surrounded by three hundred plants that require different watering schedules, different light levels, different potting mixes, and different forms of attention. “Why begonias? Why not something easier? Why three hundred of them?”
She describes a childhood in a Hong Kong public housing estate in the 1980s — a flat of roughly four hundred square feet shared by five people, with no balcony, no garden, and exactly one plant: a Sansevieria in a plastic pot on the kitchen windowsill that her grandmother watered with the dregs of the rice cooker. “It was indestructible,” she says. “The perfect plant for a family that had no space for plants. And I remember thinking, even then, that I wanted something that needed me. Something that would die if I got it wrong. Because then, if it lived, it would mean something.”
This is one of the quieter truths of plant collecting: the plants that matter most are the ones that could have died. A Sansevieria requires nothing and rewards nothing. A Begonia amphioxus, the one that died in six weeks and started all of this, requires everything — the right temperature, the right humidity, the right light, the right substrate, the right water, the right stillness — and the reward, when you get it right, is a leaf that looks like a fragment of dark stained glass. The difficulty is not a bug; it is the feature. The difficulty is the point.
“There is also,” she adds, “something about begonias specifically. They are not like roses, where the beauty is obvious and universal. A begonia’s beauty is specific and strange. You have to learn to see it. And once you do, you can’t un-see it. Every new leaf becomes a little event. You notice the exact shade of pink on the new growth of Begonia ‘Little Darling.’ You notice that the spots on Begonia maculata ‘Wightii’ are slightly larger on the leaves that get slightly more light. You notice that Begonia ‘Escargot’ — the one with the spiral at the centre of the leaf, like a snail shell — starts its spiral slightly differently on every leaf, as if it’s experimenting with the design each time. The noticing becomes a practice. A form of attention. And I think, in a city like this one, where everything moves so fast, there is something radical about paying that kind of attention to a leaf.”
She gestures at the shade house around her. “This is not a collection,” she says, and she means it. “This is a meditation.”
On the way out, she stops at a small pot on the lowest shelf — a begonia so young it has only three leaves, each one the size of a fingernail, each one a deep, bruised purple with those same silver spots that caught her eye in the Flower Market ten years ago. It is a seedling of Begonia amphioxus, grown from seed she collected from the plant that replaced the plant that died. She touches one leaf very gently with the tip of her finger.
“This one,” she says, “is the great-great-grandchild of the one that died. It has never known anything but my shade house. It has no idea that its ancestors came from a limestone cliff in Borneo. And it’s producing better colour than any of them.” A pause. “I don’t know what to make of that.”
She doesn’t need to. The leaf, if it could speak, would say that adaptation is not the same as loss. That a plant grown in a Sai Kung rooftop can be as beautiful as one grown on a limestone cliff in Sarawak. That three hundred begonias in the care of one woman in Hong Kong is not a collection but a conversation — one that started with a dead plant in 2014 and shows no sign of ending.
