226 



Garden and Forest. 



[May 7, 1890. 



were the Forsythias, Magnolia Lenne, M. stellata, some 

 Asiatic species of Prunus, and Nitttalia cerasiformis of 

 the Pacific Coast. In all dry situations the Forsythias are as 

 richly laden with blossoms as usual, but the buds were largely 

 destroyed where the ground was wet, and similar effects were 

 noted in comparing the early flowering small Magnolias. 



On account of their precocious tendencies the pollen-bear- 

 ing catkins of most of the foreign species of Hazels are 

 usually destroyed before spring, and even the catkins of 

 some of the exotic Willows shared the same fate during this 

 mild winter. The frost did not penetrate far into the soil, 

 and, coupled with the previous advantage of a damp summer, 

 the past season was a very favorable one for the moisture-lov- 

 ing Rhododendrons and the Azaleas, and for the preservation 

 of their flower-buds, although with few exceptions the buds of 

 some extremely early flowering varieties were quite destroyed. 

 With the protection usually given them, plants of Calluna 

 vulgaris and allied Heaths appear to have suffered as severely 

 this mild winter as they did in seasons with records of twenty 

 below zero. 



Arnold Arboretum. 7- &• 7 ac ^' 



within the last ten years, and it is in bloom now. The ra- 

 cemes, five in number, are pendulous, two to three feet long, 

 and bearing from fifteen to thirty flowers, each of which has a 

 drooping pedicel six inches long, bearing a pair of large wing- 

 like bracts four inches from its base, the flower being four 

 inches across, and composed of four spreading sepals, five 

 unequal petals, three of them large, and in the position usually 

 occupied by the standard in the flower of an ordinary Legume. 

 The stamens are united at the base, and form a long curved 

 tube. The color of the whole flower, bracts, pedicel and all, is 

 the richest vermilion or vivid scarlet, with blotches of rich 

 lemon-yellow and a faint bluish tinge on the standard-like 

 petals. In habit and foliage the plant resembles Brownea or 

 Jonesia. The temperature supposed to be essential to this 

 plant is from seventy to eighty degrees, with a bottom heat of 

 ninety degrees, but the Kew plant is growing in a house de- 

 voted principally to Aroids and Tree-ferns, along with the 

 largest of which it is planted out in an unheated but well- 

 drained bed of soil. The temperature maintained in this house 

 in winter is sixty-five degrees in severe weather, whilst in sum- 

 mer it ranges from seventy to eighty-five degrees. This is 



Hyde Park : Entrance Front. — See page 222. 



A Few Greenhouse Plants. 



Amherstia nobilis.— It is now fifty years since this magnificent 

 plant was introduced from India into England. Its fame 

 had become known from a description by Dr. Wallich, who 

 found it in 1827 in Martaban, growing along with Jonesia 

 Asoca, another splendid-flowered leguminous tree. Writing 

 of the Amherstia, Wallich said : " The largest of the two trees 

 I found was forty feet high, with a girth of six feet near the 

 base. Both were profusely ornamented with pendulous ra- 

 cemes of large vermilion-colored blossoms forming superb 

 objects, unequaled in the flora of the East Indies, and, I pre- 

 sume, not surpassed in magnificence and elegance in any part 

 of the world." Many futile attempts had been made to intro- 

 duce this plant into English gardens before the Duke of Devon- 

 shire sent a collector specially for it, and succeeded in import- 

 ing and establishing a plant in the famous Chatsworth Gardens. 

 This plant is still alive. But the Duke was not the first to 

 flower the Amherstia, a small plant in the collection of Lady 

 Lawrence, at Ealing, flowering first in 1849. The first raceme 

 that developed was sent to the Queen, and the second to Kew 

 for figuring in the Botanical Magazine. A plant now in the 

 Kew collection — originally, I believe, a cutting from the Ealing 

 specimen — has produced a few flowers on several occasions 



precisely what one keeps an ordinary stove at. Evidently, 

 therefore, Amherstia may be grown and flowered in any 

 house devoted to tropical plants. The Kew specimen ib about 

 ten feet high. 



Aristolochia Goldieana. — In a genus remarkable for excep- 

 tional variety of form, size, color and odor, A. Goldieana is 

 the most astonishing of all. It is the largest flowered of any 

 known plant except the monster parasitic Rafflesia Arnoldii, 

 which is peculiar to Sumatra; it is also very strong in form and 

 very vile in odor. The tawny yellow or lurid purple color of 

 the flowers and the possession of a strong disagreeable odor 

 appear to be characters peculiar to all very large flowered 

 plants, except, perhaps, the Victoria. Thus in Stapelia gigan- 

 tea, the large Amorphophalli, Godwinia gigas and this Aris- 

 tolochia we have these characters, namely, purple-brown and 

 yellow, and an odor more powerful than pleasant. A. Goldie- 

 ana was introduced into Britain in 1867, when a plant was re- 

 ceived in Glasgow from the Rev. W. C. Thomson, a mission- 

 ary in Old Calabar, who found it in flower " growing in a dry 

 situation and surrounded with bush." This plant flowered in 

 the Glasgow botanic gardens, and was figured in the Botanical 

 Magazine, t. 5672. Probably all the plants of this species now 

 in European collections are the progeny of this first intro- 

 duced one. It has flowered several times within the last ten 



