96 AUSTRALIAN TREES AND SHRTJBS. 



INTERESTING LOCAL GARDENS. 



As regards Australian plants, we are fortunate in this 

 neighbourhood in being in close touch with several very 

 interesting gardens. There are two I might specially mention 

 where Australian trees and shrubs have been under careful 

 experimental cultivation for many years. The first of these 

 are the well-known gardens attached to Abbotsbury Castle. 

 They contain one of the largest private collections of sub- 

 tropical plants to be found, if we except Devon and Cornwall, 

 in any part of the British Isles. Here, during the last hundred 

 years, successive Earls of Ilchester have brought together 

 and cultivated with singular success the most attractive 

 representatives of the floras of temperate and sub-tropical 

 countries, showing what thoughtful selection and wide and 

 intimate knowledge of plants are capable of producing. 

 Speaking of these gardens in a recent letter received from so 

 distinguished an authority as Sir Ray Lankester, he says 

 " the Abbotsbury gardens are about the most interesting I 

 have ever seen." In a catalogue of 115 pages prepared by the 

 Dowager Countess of Ilchester in 1899, there are recorded 

 about three thousand names of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous 

 plants from all parts of the world which were then growing 

 in the gardens. I can make no attempt to describe them 

 here. I must confine attention within the limits of my 

 subject that is to trees and shrubs of Australian origin. 



Another interesting garden, but of very modest dimensions 

 as compared with Abbotsbury, is that established in recent 

 years at the Old Orchard, at Broadstone, by that illustrious 

 man of science, the late Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, O.M. 

 Although since his death it has not been found possible to 

 maintain the garden in anything like its former high standard 

 of cultivation, it still contains a large number of rare sub- 

 tropical trees and shrubs. I have a list of about forty species 

 I made on the occasion of a visit to the garden, by permission 

 of Mr. W. G. Wallace, early in January, 1916. There are a 

 few interesting sub-tropical plants to be met with at Cuffnells, 



