EDITOR'S NOTE: "Home & Away" is a section about the life experiences of expats living outside of the major metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai. If you are such an expat and have an interesting story to share, please send an e-mail to expat@chinadaily.com.cn.

As a resident of Kunming, the City of Eternal Spring and the capital of Yunnan province, David Paterson experiences blue skies, cool days, and lots of green. The 52-year-old native of Scotland can be found cycling through the streets of Kunming from Jinjiang Hotel, where he has resided for the past six months, to a greener part of the city — the Kunming Institute of Botany under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Paterson, who is an avid mountain climber and marathon runner, makes the 30-kilometer trip five days a week. At the institute, he works as a senior horticulturist and a liaison between the institute and the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.

After retiring from a directorship at the Royal Botanic Garden, Paterson decided the slow life wasn't for him and began a series of conservation projects that eventually brought him to Kunming.

"I was kind of looking for some new challenges, but I wanted to continue doing work in the environmental arena," he says.

Currently, he works with the Naxi people, one of the 25 ethnic minority groups found in Yunnan province, in habitat conservation.

"I wanted to work with the local population, the indigenous mountain people, to utilize farmers' transferable skills to give them an opportunity to work in their natural environment in a more sustainable way," he says.

Kunming is known for its natural beauty, found in places like the Stone Forest, as well as its abundance of subtropical plants, but it isn't the flora that draws Paterson to Yunnan.

"I've worked in a botanical garden for 30 years, but I can admit now that my passion has never been for plants, my passion is for mountains," he explains. "I wanted to study mountain plants, not because I was particularly interested in plants, but because I thought it would take me to the mountains. That's why I picked Yunnan — it's the gateway to the Chinese Himalayas."

Paterson has been on expeditions in east Africa, across the mountains in Europe, the United States, and several areas of the Himalayas collecting plants for research. He has spent the last two decades traveling between his homeland and various parts of China, sometimes spending only a month or two out of the year at his home in Edinburgh.