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NEWS OP THE MONTH. 



United Horticultural Society, June 5th. — The chair was occupied by Mr. 

 Shirley Hibberd, one of the Vice-Presidents. Amongst the various subjects exhi- 

 bited were tlie following : —From Mr. Groom, of Ipswich, three varieties of tricolor 

 f^eraniums, the best being Miss Turner, a richly-coloured leaf in the style of Mrs. 

 Pollock, but with less green, a fine bold zone, and less tendency to green in the 

 margin. The flowers are rather loose, and light red, it is of close compact habit, 

 and apparently a good grower. Mr. Fr'y, of Manor Nursery, Lee, Kent, exhibited 

 a fuchsia named Artistic, the habit excellent. The flower has finely recurved sepals 

 of a bright coral-red colour, and a rather straight purple corolla. Mr. Howard, 

 gardener to J. Brand, Esq., Balham, put up a large and beautiful collection of 

 varieties of Cattleya Mossia3. Mr. Walker, of the Clapton Nurserj^, sent Erica 

 longiflora, a fine old plant with bold racemes of long-tubed pale yellow flowers. 

 From the same came Erica ventricosa grandiflora, the best of the ventricosas ; the 

 ■flowers are large and elegant, the colour a soft shade of rose-red. Mr. Hibberd 

 exhibited a collection 'of plants, comprising a large collection of seedling zonale 

 geraniums in flower, and some miscellaneous subjects. The zonales were described 

 as showing a fair average of results in hybridizing with first-class kinds ; they were 

 all iu a certain sense good as decorative plants, and were such as the exhibitor 

 used largely to make pyramids of plunged plants out of doors, the beauty of which 

 far exceeded that of any ordinary bedding effects, as the plants, varying from one 

 to three feet high, and of all colours — from pure white and rich rose to all shades 

 of crimson and scarlet — could be grouped in beds of cocoa-nut fibre, so as to form 

 pyramids rising four or five feet, and thence down to the ground line rich with 

 colour. Attention was called to two plants in particular : one of these is called Mrs. 

 Spencer ; it has a fine bold globular truss, crowded with large flowers of great 

 substance, the top petals meeting the edges of the side petals, but not overlapping. 

 The colour is clear flesh, shading to clear lively salmon-red, with salmon-red veins. 

 Another, called Kose of AUandale, has large flowers of the Beauts du Suresne type. 

 Mr. Hibberd had exhibited last year several seedlings with flowers containing six 

 and seven petals each; he now presented one with eight jjetals, all of good breadth, 

 and laid over each other, flat and imbricated, and forming a really beautiful flower, 

 quite difl'erent to the chaffy appearance of the recently introduced double varieties 

 from the Continent. Witli these came Pernettya speciosa, a very elegant and com- 

 pact heath-like shrub, completely smothered with pretty white heath-like flowers. 

 This was described as superior to P. mucronata, wliich was commonly in cultivation, 

 as neater in habit, forming a handsome specimen equal in beauty to any white- 

 flowered heath, and bearing when the flowers were over abundance of red berries. 

 Equisetum sylvaticum, extravagantly elegant and delicately coloured, a rather 

 scarce but easily grown hardy plant, a native of Britain. Athyrium Filix fcemina 

 grandiceps, one of the most beautiful varieties of Lady Fern. This far surpasses 

 crispa in its parsley-like denseness of growth and elegant " crisped" or " curled " 

 habit. Eaphauus caudatus in three stages of growth. One of the plants was from 

 a batch sown at tlie end of February, and kept under glass till the middle of April, 

 when they were plunged in an open border. They had been shifted as they required 

 it from thumb-pots to 7-inch pots, and had been allowed to grow as they pleased, 

 liaving a rich light soil, and plenty of water. They were quite healthy and strong, 

 with large dark green leaves, and purple pods about a foot long, which were still 

 growing, and would probably soon touch the edges of the pots, the stems bearing 

 them being about two feet from the pot. Another batch had been sown at the 

 same time, and grown in the same way, but at the flrst appearance of bloom-buds 

 on the leading shoot, those buds had been nipped out, and the sample shown bore 

 pods about eight inches long on the side branches. These pods were a finer colour 

 than those of the first batch, and the plants had a better appearance, bearing 

 abundance of flowers, and showing incipient pods in abundance. The third example 

 was one of a batch of Eaphauus serpentarius, a v.ariety of K. caudatus, the pods of 

 which are more contorted than those of K. caudatus. These had been sown singly 

 in thumb-pots in the latter part of April, and the pots placed under glass. As soon 

 as the plants were up, they were placed out of doors on a sunny border, and were 

 now in 6-inch pots, showing their fii-st flower-buds. Mr. Hull, of Blackheath, 



