The Valley of Flowers is a Himalayan meadow in Uttarakhand that spends most of the year under snow and opens for a few weeks of the monsoon, when some five hundred flowering species come up together. The mix turns over fast enough that a week apart gives you a different valley. Blue Himalayan poppies come in July; in August it is the Brahma Kamal, a hooded flower that opens toward dusk and blooms once a year. Nobody is allowed to stay the night. The valley is walked in and out in a day from the village of Ghangaria below it. The last stony kilometres climb through the Bhyundar gorge, narrow enough to hold shadow most of the morning, with waterfalls coming down both walls and the stone slick with moss. Then the walls fall back and the basin opens all at once; most people stop where they stand.
The Pushpawati runs through it, braided and grey with the rock dust ground down by the glacier above, cold enough to chill the air along the banks. You cross it on stones. The bloom comes with the heaviest rain of the year, so the walk is done in wet and cloud, and by afternoon the mist rolls up the valley and takes the peaks. Hill tradition has this as the ground where Hanuman searched for the herb to revive Lakshmana, and it was long left alone as charmed. Many of the plants here really are used in Himalayan medicine. About seven hundred metres off the main path a single headstone stands out in the meadow. Joan Legge, an English botanist, fell to her death here in 1939 while collecting for Kew, and her sister came in 1943 to set the stone. Walking out to it takes you across the flowering ground instead of along the edge, and by August the growth is high enough that the stone is on you before you see it. She is the only one who stays the night.