EXOTICS IN CORNWALL. 315 



gardens and grounds with some of the most delicate of exotic 

 flora, which, after all that can be said for other testimony, is the 

 most satisfactory test of a climate. To northern horticulturists, 

 what has been done in this respect all along the south coast west 

 of the Tamar must be a convincing proof that we are appropri- 

 ating every favour which our geographical situation offers. In 

 addition to extensive ranges of hardy ornamental timber, every 

 estate now has its collection of sub-tropical subjects, and plants 

 which are sacredly cared for under glass throughout the mid- 

 lands and the north not only live out of doors during the winter 

 as if to the manner born, but many which have been known to 

 fall victims to the severity of some of the winters as far South 

 as Turin, actually pass through our own unscathed. As the 

 Englishman has shown adaptability for almost every country 

 under the sun, so the climate of Cornwall has successfully wooed 

 into obedience floral rarieties from the temperate to the 

 equatorial zones. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that 

 every known land has been laid under contribution by our gentry 

 in their praiseworthy labour of love. What thirty years ago 

 would have been written down as the hallucination of an ultra- 

 enthusiast in horticulture is to day one of the standing features 

 of our county. No longer have we to go to our stove-houses to 

 see the lordly Banana, the stately turcrcea, the musk-scented 

 Olearia, the Citron and the Orange. We have them all growing 

 in the open, where, summer and winter alike, we may behold 

 them clothed in all their beauty. 



Lest it be objected that the majority of our exotics are placed 

 in the warmest and most sheltered corners of our county estates, 

 and are therefore not to be regarded as reliable tests of the 

 salutary nature of our winters, it may be pointed out that the 

 same thing obtains on a smaller scale in hundreds of cottage 

 gardens. It is the easiest thing imaginable to take the carping 

 critic to enclosure after enclosure where sub-tropical shrubs not 

 only live through our winters, but flourish without the least 

 semblance to protection. At Ponsanooth the writer has known 

 the Aloysia citrindora to attain a height of over twenty feet. 

 Solanum jasminoides, as every one' knows who has been over the 

 high road from Penryn to Enys Lodge, and has landed at King 

 Harry, on the river Fal, grows rampageously with no other care 



