Beautiful Flowering Shrubs 



Common Buddleia, the "Orange-ball Tree," for this 

 shrub of transcendent magnificence is the new Purple 

 Buddleia, B. variabilis, which not two decades ago was 

 first brought into this country by Mr. E. H. Wilson 

 from the province of Hupei in Central China. 



Our original Buddleia Buddleia globosa the 

 Orange-ball Tree, has been known to us for nearly a 

 century and a half, to be precise, ever since 1774, when 

 Messrs. Kennedy and Lee well-known nurserymen of 

 those days imported it from its home in Chile and 

 offered it at a price to an admiring public. " Most 

 beautiful of all (flowering shrubs) ... is the Buddleia 

 globosa. . . . When June draws to its close, it is 

 laden with thousands of blossoms like little golden 

 oranges, and fills the air with honied scent," was 

 Bright's verdict as he surveyed it in his Lancashire 

 garden a century later. Its rather uneuphonious name 

 was given to it by an English botanist, Dr. Houstan, 

 as an appreciation of the still more uneuphoniously 

 named Adam Buddie, one time Rector of Farnbridge 

 in Essex, and later a Reader at Gray's Inn, where he 

 died in 1715. The rector's claim to botanical remem- 

 brance lies in his herbarium, his " Hortus Siccus . . . 

 Buddleanus sive Methodes," now in the Sloane MSS. 

 at the British Museum, but he would certainly long 

 ere this have sunk into oblivion had not immortality 



been conferred upon him by the naming of a shrub. 



166 



