Descrrerion.— Shrub, about 6 ft. high, | straggling. 
Branches long, armed with recurved prickles. Leaves 
bipinnate, with 3-8 pairs of pinnae; rhachis furnished with 
two recurved prickles on the lower surface and one straight 
ascending prickle on the upper surface at each node, inter- 
nodes of rhachis armed or unarmed; leaflets 5-10 pairs, 
elliptic-oblong or obovate-oblong, rounded at the apex, 
rounded or obtuse at the base, 3-3 in. long, 4—;°, in. broad, 
densely dotted with pellucid glands, glabrous on the upper 
surface, puberulous on the lower. Stipules small and 
caducous. tacemes about 9 in. long, shortly peduncled, 
lax-flowered; rhachis usually glabrous; pedicels slender, 
over lin. long. Flowers about 30. Calyx-tube very short; 
lobes ovate-oblong, rounded, about } in. long, finally 
reflexed. Petals lemon-yellow, obovate, the uppermost one 
smaller than the others, striped with red, and provided with 
two auricles above the short claw. Stamens 10, red, alter- 
nately shorter; filaments densely villous below. Ovary 
oblong, compressed, hardly 4 in. long; style tubular, trun- 
cate, fringed at the apex, glabrous elsewhere. Legume 
oblong, straight, about 3 in. long, with a spine-like cusp at 
the apex of the ventral suture, and a prominent dorsal keel. — 
Seeds 6-9, oblong, smooth.—T’. A. SPRAGUE. 
Cunrivation.—Caesalpinia japonica first flowered in 
England in 1887 in the Coombe Wood nursery of Messrs. J. 
Veitch & Sons, by whom the plant had been introduced from 
Japan a few years previously. It is hardy only in sheltered 
positions in the south of England, the plant from which the 
present plate was prepared being one of a group established 
in a recess under the south wall of the Temperate House at 
Kew, where it has grown practically uninjured by frost for 
about five years. In some Cornish and Irish gardens it is 
quite at home, one of the largest specimens, which flowers 
freely every year, being in the garden of Lord Barrymore 
at Fota, near Cork. Whilst the species generally are 
strong climbers, this forms a somewhat straggling deciduous 
shrub, the shoots being comparatively short; the flowers 
are borne in terminal racemes on the young growths in 
June.—W. Warson. 
Fig. 1, node of the leaf rhachis, seen from above; 2 and 3, stamens; 
4, pistil :—all enlarged. 
