Between 2600 and 2000m, broadleaf trees like Betula, Acer, Prunus and Pterocarya begin to share the canopy with evergreens such as Picea and Tsuga. Nowhere is bamboo growth more luxuriant than at these levels, with larger species such as Fargesia robusta (umbrella bamboo) reaching heights of 2m or more. Arrow bamboo is especially important to giant pandas during the spring. There are plants growing here that are almost as rare and threatened as the pandas. The dawn redwood or ‘dinosaur tree’, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, was believed to have been extinct for 20 million years, but in 1944 was found thriving in Sichuan. When journalist Milton Silverman visited China in 1948 to see the trees for himself he wrote: ‘we found a lost world –a world that existed more than a million years ago.’ The Chinese know the dawn redwood as the water larch. It is shaped like a swamp cypress and thrives in wet conditions. At 42m in height and 2m in diameter it is less half the size of North American redwoods, and is the only redwood that is deciduous. Its tall stately shape is used to decorate towns and it is now grown as a timber crop in several areas of central and south-eastern China. Farmers also once used the leaves and shoots as fodder for their cattle.

Distributed throughout the bamboo forest is another ‘living fossil’, the gingko. Known also as the maidenhair tree, it has survived almost unchanged for 200 million years. It first became known to botanists in the West in 1690 when Engelbert Kaempfer published his writings of his visit to Japan. In 1730 the first plant arrived in Utrecht and a tree planted in 1754 still stands in Kew Gardens in Richmond, London. In Palaeozoic times, the gingko was distributed throughout the world, including North America, Eurasia, Australia and the Isle of Mull. Mature trees tower 24m above the bamboo understorey that is panda territory and, depending on local conditions, can be either narrow or broadly spreading. The gingko is a deciduous tree with distant ancestral links to conifers, but its leaves are in no way needle-like nor does it produce cones. Gingko leaves are like long-stemmed fans with scalloped edges and a deep central notch, a shape which prompted one sixteenth-century Chinese writer to call it the ‘duck’s-foot tree’. Gingko is actually the modern name for the Japanese version of Chinese ‘yin-kuo’, meaning silver fruit. The gingko’s male and female flowers produce yellow, plum-shaped fruit that give off an offensive smell when crushed but which contains edible seeds. In days past, the gingko was a prominent feature of Chinese and Japanese temple gardens: its beauty inspired the soul of the initiate, and its kernels, when roasted, provided sustenance for his body. Traditionally, a little maotai, China’s equivalent of whisky, was said to help the appreciation of both the gingko’s beauty and its favour.

Below 1600m, the mixed conifer and broadleaf band of forest gives way to evergreen broadleaf forest including poplar, Cerodiphyllum and oak. Or rather, such forests did once exist over a wide lowland area. In time past, the panda’s range undoubtedly extended deep into this benign vegetation zone. But today, the lower limit of the giant panda’s range and that of the forest itself, is no longer set by altitude, but by agriculture. Terraces of maize often reach up as far as 2000m and almost everything below this contour is under the sway of humans, a landscape of field upon field of crops. Every year the fragile band of panda habitat is eroded, from below by rising terraces, and from within by logging activity. This combination of logging and agriculture drive the giant panda towards extinction (see conservation –threats)