224 Notices suggested hy a Tour in Trance, 



iliella Azedarach, which, in our climate, will scarcely endure a 

 slight frost, was forming fine trees. That beautiful and graceful 

 plant, Acacia Julibrissin, was flourishing, and making fine stand- 

 ards, with stems as thick as a man's arm. An avenue of catalpas, 

 of sixty years' growth, the plants now covered with seed, with 

 the before-mentioned instances, told a tale of a better clime than 

 we can boast of in old England. Very few new or rare plants 

 are, however, to be seen here, though the garden altogether is 

 very interesting, owing to its fine specimens of hardy American 

 trees, museums of natural history, anatomy, &c. The two new 

 iron palm-houses now erecting are, perhaps, the most magnificent 

 structures of the kind ever yet built, and are the boast of the 

 Parisians. The tanks for aquatics, heated, as the houses are, 

 by steam, are very extensive and superb. The iron rods and 

 curtains attached to most of the green-houses in France, to pro- 

 tect them from hail storms, shows a prevalence of those (to gar- 

 deners) horrible visitations, from which we are, with some few 

 partial exceptions, nearly exempt. Fitex ^'gnus castus, and its 

 varieties, were now in full bloom, and formed a beautiful mass, 

 covered with racemes of lavender-coloured flowers. One of 

 those anomalies, so striking to a foreigner, here caught my 

 attention ; fences made of slight sticks, not larger than a man's 

 thumb, stuck in the ground at an angle of 45°, crossing each 

 other so as to form a kind of trellis- work with diamond-shaped 

 openings. These fences, which ai'e bound together with osiers, 

 look vei'y light and pretty, but are not calculated to last more 

 than one year, in places where a fence must constantly be kept; 

 and form incongruous accompaniments to the immensely heavy 

 unwieldy copper watering-pots, with nncouth spouts, that would 

 last half a century ; the fences and the watering-pots both con- 

 trasting strongly with our own usages in such matters. 



The purple laburnum, of which so much has been said lately, 

 was growing here in great perfection. It came accidentally from 

 seed among some common laburnums, in 1828, in the nursery of 

 M. Adam, whence its name of Cytisus AdamzV in some cata- 

 logues. A fine plant was shown me by M. Camuset, which 

 appeared to be half Cytisus purpureus, and the remainder purple 

 laburnum. On examination, the curious fact was ascertained, 

 that the purple laburnum, which is evidently a hybrid between 

 C. purpureus and C. iaburnum, had partially returned to the 

 habits of one of its parents, the C. purpureus. This is surely a 

 most unusual occurrence. Here was no trickery of grafting 

 practised ; for I saw nearly a similar effect produced, in July of 

 the present year (1836), on a tree which I had sent to the Hon. 

 C. Herbert of Ickleton, Cambridgeshire, in 18S4, which pre- 

 sented precisely the same appearance. At the extreme end of 

 one of its shoots there came forth a branch of the pure Cytisus 



