OCTOBEK 257 



beauty, such species as Phyllostachys Henonis and Arun- 

 dinaria nobilis tossing their plumes to a height of 

 twenty or twenty-five feet, patient of every phase of our 

 climate except wind, from which they must have reason- 

 able shelter. Our complacency in possessing plants which 

 lend such an Oriental aspect to woodland glades and lawn 

 margins has received a sudden and sorrowful check. 

 Simultaneously, in all parts of Europe where bamboos 

 are grown, many species have flowered during the past 

 summer. I presume the same has occurred in their 

 native lands, because some plants of the black bamboo 

 (Phyllostachys nigra) consigned to me direct from Japan 

 in the autumn of 1904, measuring only two or three feet 

 high, burst out into flower as copiously as those which 

 have been established here for twenty years. Now the 

 flowering of garden plants is not usually reckoned a 

 calamity; but in the case of bamboos it is a peculiarly 

 severe one, not because the flowers are far less beautiful 

 than those of many of our commonest field grasses, but 

 because they are the prelude of inevitable death of the 

 whole plant. Imagine, therefore, my dismay when I 

 found that a noble sheaf of Phyllostachys Quilioi, which 

 has decorated a secluded nook in my garden for more 

 than twenty years, had become last summer a mass of 

 dingy inflorescence, and is now as dead as Queen Anne. 

 It leaves a terrible blank, and certain it is that such 

 aching voids will have to be deplored throughout the 

 length and breadth of horticultural Europe. 



This suicidal habit of most bamboos has been recorded 



by many botanists and travellers during the last hundred 



years. Whole forests of certain species have been known 



to disappear in India in a single season, to the manifest 



R 



