One of the world's leading plant hunters and gardening authors, Dan Hinkley vividly remembers his close encounter with several black bears in Alaska while taking a cutting from a rare plant.
Mr Hinkley (56), of the United States, who recently gave an illustrated talk in Dunedin, had an excessively close look at the bears near a glacier-fed creek in Juneau, Alaska.
"There was a bear coming upstream - there was a bear coming downstream.
"I couldn't believe what I was looking at."
He quickly reviewed his options after spotting an "absolutely striking" plant, a previously undescribed herbaceous perennial of the lily family.
"I thought about leaving it, but I just couldn't bear it, so to speak."
He took a broken stem from the plant and ran off at high speed, escaping the bears.
He later joked about what he must have looked like as he made his escape, wildly running across the creek and scrambling up a bank to safety.
"I tell you, if I had a picture of me on You Tube, I probably could retire."
That incident in 2001 also neatly illustrates both the highs and the lows of a plant hunter's life.
He had later sought to safeguard the plant material by keeping it cool in a small refrigerator in his room, but it became an unusable frozen mess.
He has since returned to the spot where he found the plant, but it was gone and he has never found another specimen.
Mr Hinkley, who has a new garden at Windcliff near Seattle, has hunted for plants in many countries and regions, including China and Southeast Asia, as well as in South and central America, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
He had another close call when he was held by Maoist rebels during a trip to Nepal in 2003.
But he takes such incidents in his stride and says they seem "minimal" compared with the greater challenges faced by earlier generations of plant hunters - including people such as Scottish-born John Muir, a pioneer of the American national parks movement - who were operating in the United States about 150 years ago.
Mr Hinkley's talk was titled "Plants for Gardens: Dan Hinkley's Friends and Foes" and was part of a national lecture tour organised by the New Zealand Gardens Trust.
His Dunedin visit was underwritten by the Friends of the Dunedin Botanic Garden and the Dunedin Rhododendron Group.
He is enthusiastic about New Zealand's "dramatic" landscape and its great variety, and is "quite dumbfounded by the range of plant material that you can grow".
And, during his first visit to Dunedin, he was "absolutely blown away" by the city's botanic garden, which was "one of the finest botanical gardens that I've ever visited".
He stayed with a leading Dunedin gardener, Margaret Barker, at Larnach Castle, and was also impressed by the castle's "absolutely lovely garden", which reminded him of some of the major gardens of northern England, Scotland and Wales.
"Once you enter the castle grounds, you feel that you're in a very, very special place."
His plant-hunting expeditions over the past 25 years had shown him that although many people "want to parcel this Earth up into what we consider to be political boundaries", nature itself remained "quite seamless" and interlinked, irrespective of national frontiers.
"It's that realisation that comes to you when you travel - the notion that it's all interconnected."
• Mr Hinkley has been awarded the Royal Horticulture Society's Veitch Memorial Medal for his contribution to the advancement of the science and practice of horticulture.
