The Buddleias 



such as B. Colmllei, which Sir Joseph Hooker charac- 

 terised as the handsomest of all Himalayan shrubs, 

 with deep rose bell-shaped flowers, arranged in terminal 

 spikes half a foot long ; B. lindleyana, a very tender 

 shrub which Fortune found in 1843 in the Chinese 

 island of Chusan, and described as having "a most 

 graceful appearance as its long spikes of purple flowers 

 hung in profusion from the hedges on the hill sides " ; 

 B. nivea, only sent from China in 1905, whose foliage 

 is even more striking than its tails of rose-purple flowers, 

 for every leaf on the under side, every bud, and even 

 the young wood, is covered with a dense white felting; 

 and the newer B. officinalis, which Mr. E. H. Wilson 

 recently found in the Yang-tse Valley when collecting 

 for Prof. Sargent of the Arnold Arboretum, U.S.A., 

 where the mauve-purple flowers have a pale blue 

 centre instead of an orange-coloured one. But these 

 new varieties are so far really no improvement on the 

 older ones for, as Mrs. Earle justly says, B. globosa 

 " has many merits besides its golden balls which 

 so charmed Mr. Bright. . . . The growth is lovely and 

 the tone of the green unusual, mixing well with many 

 summer flowers. It lasts a long time in water in the 

 hottest weather. The more you cut it the better it 

 seems to do. It was killed to the ground in the cold 

 winter of '94-' 95, but broke up from the roots as strong 



as ever. Some plants do this, others never recover." 



169 



