TWO-LEAVED PINES 53 



group — at home, mind you, not abroad — has had 

 meted out to it all round about as castigating a dose 

 of " damnation with faint praise " as ever fell to the 

 lot of any misfortunate man, beast, or plant upon 

 earth, the Pinaster, on the other hand, has been the 

 lucky recipient of praises sung by poets, of thanks- 

 giving lip-service expressed by growers, and of high 

 hopes entertained by theorists. 



Whether there is any mysterious property of air 

 and climate that gives an enabling power to the 

 tree, that boasts one whorl of branchlets, buds, and 

 cones per annum, to prosper in our island home, 

 and withholds it from the other little coterie, that 

 goes one better in this direction and produces more 

 than one whorl per annum, we dare not hazard 

 opinion. Nothing under a Royal Commission — and 

 most Royal Commissions indulge in a minority report 

 — appointed by the Board of Agriculture would dare 

 essay a final pronouncement on this question, but 

 appearances rather point that way. Possibly their 

 finding would be that whereas most of the Banksia, 

 five out of seven, come from the Atlantic side of 

 America, and those districts that Professor Sargent 

 in his conspectus marks out under the letter A, and 

 describes as north-eastern, onl}^ one of the Pinasters 

 comes from that tabooed district, and that is the 

 P. Resinosa, which alone of them is labelled as 

 unsatisfactory here. 



Of the Banksia and the seven (without varieties) 

 enumerated as belonging to it, only two appear 

 to be moderately hardy, while of the Pinaster 

 group, with its .formidable array of independent 

 varieties {i.e. the Austrian numbered as a variet}^ of 

 the Corsican), all except the P. Resinosa, and that 

 ominously from the fatal Atlantic side of America, 

 are good growers with us. 



