THE BAMBOO GARDEN 3 
an autumn which lasted beyond Christmas (witness the 
roses !), can have been no more ripened than the culms, and 
must have been cruelly pinched when at last the frost came 
armed with its iron nippers. As a matter of consequence, the 
first shoots of 1895 were not as strong as they would have been 
but for this combination of adversities. The normal yearly 
increase in the size of the young plants was not observable. 
But there was no falling out of the ranks, not a single species, 
hardly a single plant was lost; and now at the end of a hot 
but terribly dry summer the plants have increased in bulk, 
if not in height, and hope again tells the most flattering 
of tales. 
From all quarters—I am writing only of places under the 
normal climate of England, and not of the favoured regions of 
the Far West and South—the same report reaches me: a severe 
check, but no deaths. As for Phyllostachys nigra, nigro- 
punctata, Boryana, Henonis, ‘and viridi-glaucescens, they 
simply laughed at the thermometer, and were as bright at 
the end of the winter as at midsummer. 
Hitherto our plants have had to struggle for bare exist- 
ence against every disadvantage. Ruthlessly torn from their 
native soil, sent away with hardly so much root as would 
furnish an adequate knob to a walking-stick, condemned to 
undergo the horrors of a journey of several weeks by sea and 
by land without light, air, moisture, or soil, what wonder if 
the poor home-sick starvelings have found it a hard matter 
to retain a spark of life in a strange land, where they find 
neither the glorious sunshine nor the bounteous rains which 
gave them birth? But the fight is over now and the victory 
is won. The death-roll is practically nil, and the survivors 
