John Eyre was a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army stationed in Hong Kong and was later promoted as General. During his time in Hong Kong, he frequented the trails of Hong Kong Island, collecting seeds and making sketches of flowers on his journeys. His watercolour paintings came with memos that marked the time and location of bloom.

Two amateur botanists were often mentioned in these memos. The first was Captain Champion who, sent to station in Hong Kong the same year as Eyre, often teamed up with Eyre to search for plants. The other was British civil servant Henry Hance. Hance, who arrived in Hong Kong earlier than Eyre, lived on and off in Hong Kong for 20 years and was a leading figure in the taxonomy of Chinese plants. While Eyre had been stationed in the West Indies and had a profound understanding of subtropical plants, he still relied on Hance to identify the large variety of species in Hong Kong. When new discoveries were made, Hance would name the species.

In 1850, botanist Berthold Seemann arrived in Hong Kong on the HMS Herald. As Hance had contracted malaria, he asked Eyre to be Seemann’s guide. Seemann wrote: “There are present in Hong-Kong two gentlemen, Dr. H. F. Hance and Lieut-Colonel Eyre, who take great interest in botany... ...Lieut-Colonel Eyre makes almost daily excursions. He possesses, besides a considerable herbarium, a beautiful set of coloured drawings of Hong-Kong plants, chiefly executed by himself. Many of the figures represent species new to science.”

In the following year, Hance entrusted his Hong Kong specimens to Seemann who later brought them to Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew). Hance’s abundant collection, together with nearly 600 plant specimens that Champion brought to England, served as the foundation for Flora Hongkongensis – the first published monograph on Hong Kong plants. Upon Eyre’s return to Britain, he wrote to William Hooker, the then director of Kew, mentioning that Champion was preparing a book on the flora of Hong Kong (presumably Flora Hongkongensis). Eyre asked to bring his own paintings and plant seeds to add to the collection. However, due to the deterioration of his health, he was unfortunately never able to make the trip. It was not until 1904 that his collection of nearly 200 paintings was sold to Kew. While Eyre may not have been an expert in botany, in an era where the Westerners perceived Hong Kong as a "barren rock," his vivid illustrations were indispensable visual records of Hong Kong's wilderness in the 19th century.