HORTICULTURAL NOMENCLATURE. 501 



There are many cries for reform just now ; and among 

 small things it is nowhere more needed than in our 

 horticultural nomenclature. 



A WALK THKOUGE THE VIA GELLIA, 



{From " The Florist? December 1868,^. 278.] 



HAVING had occasion during the past summer to 

 visit Derbyshire on business, it occurred to us to 

 give up one day to a walk through some parts of its 

 beautiful scenery that we had not before traversed. 

 Communicating this intention to our household, the only 

 remonstrance we met with was from a bright boy of six, 

 mildly put "You'll come back as soon as you can, won't 

 you, pa." 



Finding ourselves at Matlock one July evening, and 

 having heard much of the picturesque and floral beauty of 

 the " Via Gellia," the mountain road to Middleton and the 

 Black Rocks, we fixed on this as the morrow's excursion. 

 We breakfasted and were on foot early, as all pedestrians 

 should be, and taking the road by Cromford were soon 

 deep in the valley. Right and left far up the hill sides, 

 and deep in the beds of the almost exhausted streams, 

 plants and flowers were strewn with a magnificent pro- 

 fusion. To attempt to enumerate and describe all these 

 would prove tedious, as the various species one is gene- 

 rally accustomed to meet with at wide intervals and 

 distances seemed gathered together here. Besides, our 

 English botany, never very deep, was sometimes tried 

 severely in settling the species, and then there were 

 species so universal as scarcely to need particularising. 

 So varied and so abundant were the forms met with at 

 every turn that we think the Via Gellia might be aptly 

 called the Valley of Flowers. Never certainly in all our 

 rambles (and in boyhood they were numerous and wide) 



