Named for Robert Fortune (1812–89), the British plant hunter, who in 1848 and subsequent years, smuggled 100,000 tea plants and seedlings out of China to Darjeeling, India, accompanied by Chinese tea growers, for the East India Company, and set up the Indian tea plantations. Fortune not only used the Wardian cases – watertight boxes with glass tops – for shipping plants, but also sowed seed into earth in the cases and these germinated in transit, ready for planting out on arrival (Cox, 1945).