OF SHRUBS, MOSTLY EVERGREEN 27 
happened! Nothing could well have saved us from 
Mulligania. Which leads me to a despairing proposition. 
Fitting, fair, and honourable it is (as Sir John Hooker 
points out) that great gardeners, explorers, lovers of these 
delights, should be commemorated and honoured in the 
names of flowers. But Sir John slides over the great 
difficulty of the question: we are not all Magnols, and 
since no man has power over his own name, and since 
a lovely, floral soul may be clothed in such syllables as 
Smee or O'Higgins, why not alter our system of nomen- 
clature, and avoid the danger of having to damn a plant 
eternally under the style and title of O'Higginsia or Smeea? 
There is actually—think of it!—a rock-garden plant 
called Boehninghausenia. On the same principle, too, 
mountains great, divine and glorious, must be saved 
from the indignity of being labelled Mount Baker or 
Mount Bullock Workman. My plan would be to adopt 
the Japanese, the savage principle, of naming for fitness ; 
and, when a plant comes up for name, my compliment to 
the great horticulturist would take the form, not of ask- 
ing him or her to stand god-parent to a possible Badlock- 
Workmannia Fanniae, but of giving him the right to 
choose the novelty’s name himself. Personally I should 
value this right far more than the ascription of a species 
under my own syllables, and take more pleasure in regis- 
tering Saxifraga Gloria than Saxifraga Farreri. 
Azalea, then, leads off with Azalea procumbens, which, 
to be correct, ought to be spoken of rather as Loiselewria 
procumbens. ‘The Alpine Azalea is the strangest and, I 
think, with the exception of Pyxidanthera and Andromeda 
hypnoeides, the smallest of all northern shrubs. It is as 
flat as any lichen or any starved mat of thyme. Indeed, 
but that its tiny leaves are leathery, bright green and 
glossy, the plant is not unlike a thin tangle of wild thyme. 
On this appear, in spring, abundant flowers, gazing upwards 
