34 Present de Malines Pear. 



it will be ably conducted. For the information of our horti- 

 cultural brethren, to be inserted in your new Magazine, I 

 herewith send you an account of a new pear, with four speci- 

 mens of the fruit, which I beg that you will taste and report 

 upon as your judgement shall direct. The history of this 

 pear is as follows : — The late Count Coloma, of Malines, 

 amused himself in raising new varieties of the pear, by im- 

 impregnating the blossom, &c. ; the idea of so doing first 

 struck him near fifty years ago, as he informed me, on his 

 reading the works of the English author, Bradley. During 

 five years that I annually visited the continent, for the pur- 

 pose of collecting buds of new fruits, I used every year to 

 receive buds from the count's garden ; several of those had 

 fruited, and were named by him ; many others, although con- 

 sidered as children of promise, had not fruited, and were, in 

 consequence, without names ; amongst the latter was a cutting, 

 containing buds of the pear now sent to you ; one of these 

 buds I inserted into the bearing branch of a pear tree growing 

 against a N. W. wall in my garden, at my late residence in 

 Surrey, which bud produced fruit in two years after its in- 

 sertion. This fruit was exhibited at a meeting of the Hor- 

 ticultural Society, and was pronounced by those gentlemen to 

 be good. I wrote to Mr. Louis StofFels, corresponding mem- 

 ber of the Horticultural Society in the city of Malines, de- 

 scribing the pear, and requesting him to trace out the name 

 of it : in reply to my letter, Mr. Stoffells stated that the 

 Count Coloma's garden was sold, and his collection of fruit 

 trees dispersed, so that no further information could be gained 

 of the pear in that quarter. To this he added, that it was the 

 wish of the Count's friends that the pear in question should 

 be called Present de Malines, by which name it is mentioned in 

 the Horticultural Society's transactions, and under this name I 

 gave buds of it to Mr. Young, nurseryman of Epsom, and some 

 others. Upon removing my collection of fruit trees last year 

 from Thames Ditton, in Surrey, to this place, I brought with 

 me a young standard tree of the Present de Malines, and 

 planted it, together with the Seckle, Urbaniste, Poire d' Ananas, 

 Passe Colmar, Napoleon, Marie Louise, Beurre, and many 

 other new fruits, in an exposed situation, on part of Cox- 

 heath. This I did for the purpose of trying if those su- 

 perior fruits would ripen on standard trees in the climate of 

 England : all the trees appear to like the soil and situation, 

 and the Present de Malines bore seven fruit this year, four of 

 which I now send to you, and suggest, if you should find the 

 fruit, upon tasting, to be of a quality that will warrant the 

 measure, that you recommend this tree as a standard to be 

 planted in the southern parts of England and Ireland ; as an 



