The leather bergenia is an exotic plant to Sevilla. Its natural habitat is forests and rocks that are between 1100 and 1800 meters in Siberia, in an area encompassing North Korea, Mongolia and part of Russia and the Chinese region of Xinjiang. Like other begonias, the leather bergenia used as an ornamental plant for its inviting flowers. The begonias in general are named after Michel Bégon (1638-1710), French governor to the orders of Louis XIV in Haiti, then a French colony, and an enthusiastic collector of plants. The actual introduction of the leather bergenia in Europe was made not by an amateur but by a real scientist, the Swedish Dr. Daniel Solander, direct disciple of the founder of modern botanical classification Linnaeus and companion of Captain James Cook on his scientific expeditions by the Pacific in mid-eighteenth century.