334 THE FLORIST. 



RHODOLEIA CHAMPIONI. 



Although good sized plants of this Rhodoleia now exist in this 

 country, yet none of them, as far as we know, have yet flowered. If 

 the figure of it in the " Botanical Magazine" for 1850 is correct, it is 

 extremely handsome. Sir William Hooker there states " Captain 

 Champion, writing from Hong Kong, December, 1849, says, ' This 

 is admitted by all here to be the handsomest of Hong Kong flowering 

 trees, and new to Europeans until I discovered it in February last. It 

 is a small tree, but would probably, like the Camellia, blossom as a 

 shrub profusely, each branch bearing from six to eight flowers. 

 Flowers (capitula) at its extremity, and these two inches and a half 

 in diameter ; sepals (leaflets of outer involucre), about twelve ; 

 petals (leaflets of inner involucre) rose coloured, about eighteen ; stamens, 

 probably fifty in each head ; conditions of growth exactly those of 

 Camellia japonica I should say, and the tree of about the same degree 

 of hardihood.' " Camelhas are stated to blossom in the same wood 

 with it, and therefore it may turn out that our cultivators keep it too 

 warm. The great pomt should be to make its young wood early, in 

 order that it might be well ripened and hardened before autumn. 

 Without this there can be little hope of its ever being flowered 

 successfully. B. 



RETROSPECTION.— No. I. THE DAHLIA. 



My" friend B. is what is usually termed a character. A florist of no 

 mean order, and for about one half of the year a most diligent one, 

 he has lived so much among flowers, that he seems to have imbibed, as 

 it were, a portion of their very nature. Like them he is all gaiety 

 and brilliancy during the period of sunshine ; but as winter approaches 

 he becomes dull and torpid : in a word, he dozes away some six 

 months of his existence at a stretch — an aimless, lifeless, spiritless being. 

 " Summer," sighed he to me the other day, "glorious summer is past 

 and gone ! How shall I ever survive the dreary dull winter evenings ?" 

 Dull, forsooth ! There is nothing dull in Nature save the jaundiced 

 mind of man : and he who ruefully bewails the dull evenings of winter 

 is as much to be pitied as he who could *' travel from Dan to Beer- 

 sheba, and cry ' All is barren.' " Tut, man ! cast a long and searching 

 glance back into the past, and I warrant me thou shalt see wherewith 

 to shorten the dreariest evening that ever weighed heavy on the soul 

 of the most confirmed hypochondriac. Findest thou no pleasure in 

 retrospection ? Has all thy bygone existence, then, been compounded 

 of "toil and trouble?" Are there no "green spots" on "memory's 

 waste," whose verdure is eternal, and whose pure streams flow on 

 unceasine;ly ? ^ ^ ^ ^ -^ Rouse thy benumbed faculties, good 

 friend of mine ! Shake the cobwebs from thy brain, and confess with 

 me, that the past is the only phase of existence in which man can 

 reahze true enjoyment. The future looms vague and dim : the present 

 is so fleeting as to elude the most determined grasp ; but the past — 



