The Escallonias 



discovered by the French botanists MM. Humbolt 

 and Bonpland, 8,400 feet up in the Andes, and a 

 description written of it ; but it was also doubtless 

 included with other species in that wonderful collection 

 of 130,000 dried specimens that was made about 1830 out 

 in South America by Hugh Cuming, F.R.S., the col- 

 lector for Sir William Hooker, then at Kew. Cuming 

 was a most thorough and enthusiastic collector, and he 

 went enormous distances along the western coast of 

 the continent in his travels. With him must be asso- 

 ciated the name of Archibald Menzies (already referred 

 to in the account of the flowering currant, see p. 17), 

 by then a veteran ; Cruikshanks, another Kew collector ; 

 and a Dr. Gillies, who, we are told, " carried with him 

 a degree of scientific knowledge and a philosophical 

 spirit of inquiry such as have fallen to the lot of 

 few travellers." 



But though they collected specimens and dried 

 them for dispatch to England, it was often left to 

 others to introduce the living plant. Thus, Escallonia 

 macrantha, chief of our hedge species, did not arrive in 

 this country alive until William Lobb, collecting for 

 the Veitches, sent it in the early forties. It flowered 

 first here in 1848, and was exhibited as a rarity in the 

 Garden Exhibition of the Horticultural Society in that 

 year, though Escallonia floribimda, another hedge species, 



and Escallonia rubra were here fifteen years earlier. 



161 



