35 
garden on the wah side of Scotland, which he achieved shortly 
before his retirem 
his plans ie the future after leaving Edinburgh the 
following _ from a letter written on April 24th last to Sir 
W. selton-Dyer is of great interest :— 
“The new Keeper will have two interesting things to carry 
out. It was bad luck that I collapsed when the negotiations 
were on completion. Lord Airlie is allowing us to have the 
sanctuary of the Caerlochan Deer Forest in which to make an 
Alpine garden. Bulley is financing. The spot is ideal. How I 
wish we had such a place going to have taken you to it on one or 
more of your northern pilgrimages. The other business is—the 
Forestry Commission offered me as much area as might be 
necessary in one of their suitable forests for the planting of 
Rhododendrons. The one I had in view was on the west 
coast near Ben More. The Rhododendron planting will be quite 
within easy reach of sage ibe and should be very attractive. 
This action has, I am glad to say, stimulated the Glasgow 
Corporation to make more use of the extensive area that belongs 
to them along the shores of Loch Goil. All this to the good. 
But I hate to drop out of it just when success is achieved—and 
indeed but for the engineering of these schemes chiefly I should 
have bid my adieu at once on settlement after the war with the 
prospect of a good time in retirement from work. I am trying 
in bed to arrange papers for a completion of a history of the 
Edinburgh Botanic Garden—begun many years ago—from which 
if I achieve it I look for much pleasure and none greater than in 
the telling of what it owes to you.” 
This, as his friends well knew, meant that for him retirement 
rather than being a time of idleness was to have been one of 
strenuous work. 
Much that he had already done remains unwritten, and it 
was the hope of Botanists that in his leisure he would have given 
us of his wide and deep knowledge, illuminated by his grasp of 
principle and mature judgment, in a treatise on the Flowering 
Plants which no living botanist could do with so masterly a 
hand. His Presidential address to the Botanical section of the 
British Association at Glasgow (1901), was but a foretaste of his 
unrivalled powers. 
To the great regret of his friends the state of his health 
prevented him from accepting the invitation to serve as President 
of the Linnean Society in 1916, and this intimation caused them 
no little anxiety. The Society awarded him the Linnean medal 
in 1919 and expressed the wish that “ he might long be spared to 
continue the work that has served its members as an example 
and encouragement.”’ His death on Nov. 30th 1922 at Courts 
Hill, Haslemere, has, alas! taken him from us as a living person- 
ality, but his work remains, and all that he was will continue as 
an example and encouragement to those who strive to follow the 
high ideal he set before. them. 
