No climbing plant ever introduced to Great Britain is 
more generally cultivated than the subject of our plate. 
Supporting itself on walls without artificial aid, by the — 
viscous at first capitate but ultimately disk-like tips of its 
tendrils, it gives little trouble to grow, and is now more 
frequently planted as a creeper on town and suburban 
houses even than the Ivy. The leaves acquire the most 
beautiful of autumn tints, and, being deciduous, do not 
produce the dark winter effect that in some places renders 
Ivy unsuitable. Nearly allied to the familiar Virginian 
Creeper, Parthenocissus guinquefolia, which also has viscous 
tendril-tips, the plant here figured, when brought into 
general cultivation in 1868 by Messrs. J. Veitch and Sons, 
was distributed as Ampelopsis Veitchii and A. japonica. 
Quite recently, authorities so careful as Koehne and 
Graebner have once more endeavoured to discriminate 
between these two plants, but it is generally conceded that 
they represent no more than two states of a single species 
for which the most familiar garden name is Ampelopsis 
Veitchti. In works which accept the view enunciated in 
the Genera Plantarum, where the genus Vitis is made to 
include all the Ampelidaceae except the species of Pteris- 
anthes and of Leea, our plant is known as Vitis inconstans, 
a name which is, however, somewhat less familiar than that 
under which it was issued by the Messrs. Veitch. But this 
view is now almost universally considered too comprehen- 
sive, and writers who, like Mr. Sprague, follow the careful 
monograph by Planchon, where the Vitis of the Genera — ; 
Plantarum is subdivided into nine distinct genera, are pre- 
cluded from using either of these familiar names. Our 
plant is neither a Vitis, in the narrower sense in which 
that name was originally and is now again more satis- 
factorily employed, nor a genuine Ampelopsis; it is a 
member of the genus which Planchon has termed Partheno- 
cissus, readily distinguishable from the other genera of 
Ampelidaceae grown out of doors in this country by having 
viscous tendril-tips, by the absence of tendrils from the 
inflorescence, and by the glandular hypogynous disk being 
entirely adnate to the ovary. P. tricuspidata has shoots of 
two distinct kinds—long shoots and short. The long shoots 
bear several leaves with leaf-opposed tendrils and axillary 
branchlets, two successive leaves having a tendril opposite 
