Boiatiic Garden dt Lisbon. 4 13 



occupies about one half the space enclosed, the remainder is 

 devoted to walks, orange, lemon, and citron quarters. 



Art being the avowed object in Portuguese gardening, the 

 eye is offended by the mechanical rigidity of the parterres, the 

 clipped, rectangular, box alleys, and the grotesque embellish- 

 ments, characteristic of the gardening of the south of Europe, 

 which disfigure the pleasure-garden ; but the number of ac- 

 climated exotics to be seen there, vigorous and unsheltered, 

 makes it an object of the greatest interest. 



The plants are grown without reference to their natural 

 orders or to any system, and have been casually planted from 

 superfluity that has arisen among those classed, or from their 

 having become too unwieldiy for culture in pots or boxes. Of 

 the genera thus cultivated in the open air, I enumerate all 

 those that were named, or that I could recognise; few of them 

 had a specific attached, and when such a thing did occur it 

 was rarely intelligible, being most frequently in the Portuguese 

 language, and sufficiently vague and unsatisfactory. Ex. gr. 

 Amaryllis reginae was marked Amayyllis vciinellia com dims 

 floi'es do Brasil (a red two-flowered Amaryllis from Brazil). 

 Many genera too there were named in honour of their donors, 

 or that had chanced to flower on some saint's day and bore his 

 or her holy name ; the generic appellations also being from 

 Tournefort (many of which have long since merged into spe- 

 cific), in some instances, increased the difficulty. 



The natural orders Canneae, Scitamineae, Bromel/^, Ama- 

 ryWidece^ Zvaurineae, Leguminosae, and Cacti were very rich, 

 and contain most probably many genera entirely new, par- 

 ticularly Scitamineae, Amarylli(^ert7, and Cacti. 



It may be necessary here to mention that the thermometer, 

 at Lisbon, frequently falls as low as 29° and 27° of Fahr. 

 I have seen the fountains in the Royal Garden covered with 

 a thin coat of ice in the morning, when the year was as far 

 advanced as April, without the plants appearing to suffer 

 injury, with exception of Carica Papaya, killed in the winter 

 of ] 825 by frost supervening on rain ; growing in an arenaceous 

 soil, they seemed to be more retarded in growth by the want 

 of moisture in summer, than by the humidity and cold of 

 winter. Erythrina carnea, E. fusca, E. picta, E. crista galli, 

 flower well ; the latter in autumn, winter, and spring, E. picta 

 ripens seed on a tree more than 15 ft. in height. Psidium 

 pyriferum, P. pomiferum, both set their fruit, but they do not 

 attain maturity; were the shrubs grown against a south wall in- 

 stead of an exposed situation, there is little doubt the fruit would 

 be perfected. Cojfea occidentalis fruits freely ; the plants flower 

 in October, and the berries ripen in May and June following. 



