340 MISCELLANEOUS LETTEES, 1886-1897 



love of flowers, she sent him for his peaty garden some plants 

 of the Star-flower (Trientalis), a rare and charming reminder 

 of their Scottish hillsides. His other Highland favourite, the 

 exquisite little Twin-flower (Linnaea), another of 



these mountain flowers, 

 More virginal and fresh than ours, 



of which he had not seen a living bloom for sixty years, had 

 already been sent by her sister-in-law, Mrs. Henry Lyell, who 

 was herself a lifelong friend of the family, being the daughter 

 of Leonard Homer, Sir William Hooker's friend. She was 

 Joseph Hooker's senior by just three weeks, and in their old 

 age used laughingly to claim great precedence on that score. 

 She outlived him three years, bright and alert to the last. 



The patch of Linnaea, Mrs. Lyell's gift, was the best of 

 mementoes. It spread and bloomed profusely under its 

 familiar pines, by 1888 making a carpet 9 feet across each 

 way literally clothed with flowers after Midsummer ; later 

 three dry springs spoiled the original patch, and its glories 

 were sustained by two daughter patches in shadier positions. 

 Twenty years after and more he continued, whenever possible, 

 to send Mrs. Lyell a spray of its blossom on her birthday 

 in the first week of June. 



Its immediate success in the wild garden is insisted on again 

 in 1888, when two kinds of Wintergreen, another rare wildling, 

 were sent to him, the one by Mrs. Lyell from Kirriemuir, the 

 other by her daughter from the Engadine, 



the floweriest land [he assures her] I ever visited except 

 Australia. Nowhere else have I seen such attractive plant 

 and insect-life, and nowhere more beautiful and at the same 

 time accessible mountain scenery. [Adding a postscript], If 

 you see Mr. Huxley pray give him my brotherly slap on the 

 shoulder, and ask him if the Engadine is not ' all right.' 



To Miss LyeU 



July 16, 1887. 



We are all well and have been entertaining our American 

 friends, Dr. and Mrs. Asa Gray, whom we accompanied to 



