484 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 458. 



always been famous for extent and excellence of cultivation. 

 This is partly due to the favorable character of the climate. 

 The rockery is not picturesque, but it provides accommoda- 

 tion for an enormous collection of all kinds of choice plants, 

 and therefore serves the main purpose of such a structure. 

 It occupies a slope upon which mounds have been thrown 

 up and the stones arranged somewhat formally, so as to 

 provide about four thousand pockets. Such genera as 

 Primula, Veronica, Silene, Gentiana, Sempervivum and 

 Saxifraga are very largely represented. Dwarf trees and 

 shrubs are planted here and there among the stones. The 

 herbaceous plants are arranged similarly to those at Kevv, 

 namely, in long narrow beds running parallel to each 

 other on a lawn in an open part of the garden. 



Among the trees Coniferee are the most noteworthy, 

 while the collection of Ericaceae is exceptionally rich. A 

 small pond for aquatics is as remarkable for the large col- 

 lection of plants it contains as for its inartistic shape. The 

 new plant-houses are excellent in design and they are 

 stocked with collections of well-grown plants of all kinds, 

 from succulents to economic plants, from Orchids to Ferns ; 

 long corridors filled with climbers, and from one side of 

 these start houses at right angles, the sheds, etc., being on 

 the other side. The old Palm-house has been greatly im- 

 proved by pulling out the sides, and all round it is a sloping 

 annex. This has resulted in a house exceptionally well 

 adapted for the cultivation of all kinds of tropical 

 plants, and although it is only about two years since 

 the alteration was made the contents of the house are 

 generally splendid examples of good cultivation. With the 

 exception of a shelf extending all round the side of the 

 annex for the accommodation of pot-plants, the whole of 

 the space is occupied by beds of soil in which the plants 

 are planted. Numerous successes have already been 

 achieved in this house in the flowering of rare plants and 

 the robust growth of recalcitrant ones. The roof is fur- 

 nished with a large collection of climbers, all luxuriating as 

 a gardener loves to see them. Combretum purpureum, 

 Odontadenia speciosa, Camoensia maxima, Momorclica 

 mixta, Corynostylis hybanthus, Ipomcea Horsfallia? and 

 Aristolochia gigas are specially noteworthy. Cycads of 

 all kinds appear to delight in being planted out, while such 

 plants as Randia maculata, Rudgea macrophylla, Napoleona 

 cuspidata, Coccoloba pubescens and Acacia sphcerocepha 

 have grown with a luxuriance never seen before. In one 

 of the large greenhouses Restio subverticillatus is repre- 

 sented by a magnificent specimen ten feet in diameter, the 

 horse-tail-like stems being seven feet long. Gleichenias, in 

 the same house, are equally remarkable for size and vigor. 



Orchids, of which the collection comprises about nine- 

 hundred species and varieties, are generally in good condi- 

 tion. The collection of Masdevallias formed by the Mar- 

 quis of Lothian, while ■ preparing his monograph of the 

 genus, has now become the property of the Edinburgh 

 Botanic Garden., Begonia President Carnot planted out, 

 the stems trained against the roof-glass in a warm house, 

 has grown to a large size and in October bore pendent 

 heads of rich rose-red flowers nearly a foot in diameter, the 

 leaves being about a foot long. Nepenthes, Droseras, Dar- 

 lingtonias, .Sarracenias and other insectivorous plants are 

 a special feature in this garden. Disa grandiflora also 

 grows as freely as on Table Mountain, and Ouvirandra 

 fenestralis, grown in a tub in a shaded position, was 

 crowded with big leaves and was in flower. A second 

 large house, originally built for Palms, is now used as a 

 temperate house and contains large specimens of Australian 

 trees, Palms, Ferns and Coniferse. Chamserops Griffithiana, 

 thirty feet high ; Livislonia Sinensis, fifty feet ; Dacrydium 

 cupressoides, forty feet ; Rhopala corcovadense, twenty 

 feet, and a unique specimen of a Podocarpus ferrugineus, 

 with long drooping whip-like branches, are among the note- 

 worthy plants in this house. It is intended to attach a 

 sloping annex to this as to the tropical Palm-house. 



A house filled with succulents, all the large specimens of 

 which are planted out in a bed of light soil, is an important 



feature. Large plants of Cereus giganteus, Echinocactus 

 Wislizeni, Opuntia imbricata and others imported from Ari- 

 zona are growing most vigorously under the liberal treat- 

 ment afforded by the planting- out system. 



The planting out of all the larger plants in preference to 

 growing them in pots is a new departure in botanic-garden 

 culture, and it is being watched with interest by all who 

 are concerned with the cultivation of plants under glass. 

 So far it has proved an unqualified success. The only pos- 

 sible objection to it is that it rushes the plants, as it were, 

 into a luxuriance which is not easily controlled, so that they 

 soon become too large for their positions. On the other 

 hand, the plants are seen at their best when treated in this 

 manner, and I would rather enjoy a healthy specimen for 

 two years than put up with a miserable half-starved scrag 

 of a plant for twenty. If a succession of young plants is 

 kept up, so that overgrown specimens may be rooted out 

 and replaced, the results of this planting-out treatment 

 must, on the whole, be far preferable to pot-culture. There 

 is a great deal too much stage and flower-pot in indoor 



"■ardenina: as practiced nowadays. TTr „, 



London. b V y W. Watson. 



New or Lmie-known Plants. 

 Aspidium simulatum, Davenport.* 



THIS is another New England Fern, new to botanical 

 science, for which we are indebted to the acute 

 observations of Raynal Dodge, who first brought it to the 

 notice of Professor Eaton and myself. That it should have 

 escaped attention so long as it did is undoubtedly due to 

 the fact that no one supposed it possible to find a new 

 Fern within the limits of an area so thoroughly worked 

 over as that of Gray's Manual was supposed to be, and if in 

 any instance it did attract attention it was in all probability 

 looked upon merely as a form of Aspidium Thelypteris or 

 Noveboracense, with which it nearly always grows. Once 

 recognized, however, it is quickly seen to be entitled to 

 specific recognition, and one wonders that it did not sooner 

 arrest the attention of some of the older botanists who were 

 generally keenly alert for new forms and quick to recog- 

 nize them. 



The frequency with which this Fern has been collected 

 since its publication, only two years ago, shows that it is 

 by no means uncommon, and that it is likely to be found 

 abundantly over a wide area of distribution, and also shows 

 that it will not always do to take it for granted that the 

 resources of any given area are exhausted, however care- 

 fully it may have been worked over. 



Unlike Aspidium Thelypteris, which prefers the partially 

 open to deep shade, this plant loves the shade and moisture 

 of cool hummocks in deep woods and swamps, thriving 

 vigorously fertile where A. Thelypteris is invariably flaccid 

 and sterile. 



The finest clumps of Aspidium simulatum that I have 

 anywhere seen were growing on large hummocks in a 

 submerged swampy woodland on Indian Point, Maine, 

 with the tall, fertile fronds overtopping the sterile half their 

 own length, and from three to three and a half or more 

 feet high. They had the hummocks all to themselves, and 

 it was a most beautiful sight to see hundreds of these tall, 

 gracefully waving fronds rising to the height of the 

 Osmundas near by, and far surpassing them in that grace- 

 fulness of form and presence which lends so great a charm 

 to many other of our native Ferns. 



Aspidium simulatum is seldom found growing in the 

 open, except where the woodlands have been cut off, leav- 

 ing its natural habitat exposed to the direct rays of the sun, 

 when it takes on a more contracted form with conduplicate 

 pinnae, and exactly simulates the narrow form of Asple- 

 nium Filix-fcemina, which suggested its name. Plants of 

 these two forms growing side by side in my garden so 

 closely resemble each other in every way that, although 



* Botanical Gazette^ vol. xix., p. ; Dei ember, 1S94. 



