Kerria, or Jew's Mallow 



it was treated here as a greenhouse plant and coddled 

 with extra warmth, and not for some time was its 

 hardy independence in this climate realised. Its yellow 

 rosettes, too, puzzled botanists, and it was classed vari- 

 ously as a bramble, a spiraea " Spirde du Japon" in 

 the rose family, and as a member of the genus Cor- 

 chorus in the mallow family, the last being the class 

 finally settled upon for it at that time. Hence it is 

 sometimes known as "Jew's Mallow," yellow being the 

 Jew's colour, and our other mallows being white, red 

 and pink. Not for a century and a quarter was the 

 shrub known in England in its natural simple form, 

 though botanists had somewhat earlier received a hint 

 of its existence in a solitary specimen of a twig sent 

 from Japan by the botanist Thunberg to his friend 

 the great Linnaeus. But from an examination of that 

 solitary example, De Candolle, the French systematic 

 botanist, saw enough to know that it was not a mallow 

 and to classify the plant in a genus Kerria all to itself 

 in the great family of the roses Rosacece. And he 

 called it " Kerria " to commemorate the work and de- 

 votion of William Kerr, a gardener at, and a plant 

 collector for Kew Gardens, who went out to Ceylon to 

 take charge of the Botanical Garden at Colombo, and 

 within a couple of years died there in 1814. 



The single-flowered Kerria was sent to England in 

 1835, and bloomed the following year in the Chelsea 



73 



