TREES 45 



Queen, aurea, alumi, compacta, may be seen by the sides 

 of the Boar and Dog Walks. No plant occurs in more 

 varieties : out of a batch of seedlings hardly any two will 

 be alike. 



The wall plants against the West Wall include a very fine 

 male Garrya elliptica, from mountains not far from San 

 Francisco, California, named in honour of a Hudson's Bay 

 pioneer, which produces clusters of yellow catkins in the 

 winter months ; also the Fox Grape of N. America, Vitis 

 riparia, to the south of the West Gate, formerly regarded as 

 an unworthy representative of the cultivated Vine of the Old 

 World, but since employed in certain of the Western 

 States for wine-making ; north of the Gate, Vitis corinthiaca, 

 cultivated in Greece and the Levant for preparing dried 

 currants, of which we are said to consume a million hundred- 

 weight per annum. They are in no sense related to our 

 garden Currant (Rides). That grapes used to ripen in Oxford, 

 as elsewhere, in the Middle Ages, indicating warmer summers, 

 is shown by the occasional mention of vineyards and uvae 

 aestivales in old documents relating to the city, c. 1220-1300. 

 Then follows Spiraea lindleyana, already a fine plant in 1853 ; 

 Colletia spinosa of S. America, a remarkable member of 

 the Rhamnaceae, in which the leafless stem is modified to 

 form flat, spiny, triangular joints; not less remarkable is 

 Ephedra distachya from the rocky shores of the Mediterranean, 

 which is considered by many botanists to belong to the 

 Coniferae. 



In the corner by the Lecture Room is a fine Loquat, Photinia 

 (Eriobotrya) japonica, a well-known Chinese dessert-fruit a 

 little larger than a crab-apple, which unfortunately rarely fruits 

 in the open in England. The garden ornament in the corner 

 of the path is a copy of the celebrated Warwick Vase. 



Against the Laboratory grow some sixteen varieties of 

 Clematis, a Magnolia Yulan from China, and an aged 

 Magnolia grandiflora, which, like the Fig-trees close by, 



