264 ARISTOCRATS OF THE GARDEN 



England and elsewhere in this country, and breeding 

 a race suited to the climatic conditions which obtain; 

 it means abandoning the old and lazy policy of rely- 

 ing upon other lands to supply our needs in this re- 

 spect; it means that we must do here what Europe 

 has done, namely, work out our own salvation. We 

 start later than they across the Atlantic but we start 

 with great advantages including those which have 

 accrued from the labors of the past. A little of that 

 concentrated effort and skill which have produced that 

 most typical of American floral products — the Per- 

 petual-flowering Carnation — would yield us our de- 

 sire in the matter of a race of hardy broad-leaved 

 evergreen Rhododendrons. 



The present-day race of evergreen Rhododendrons 

 is essentially an English product and to better under- 

 stand the subject let us briefly investigate its early 

 history. No Rhododendron is native of the British 

 Isles and the first of the evergreen section to be intro- 

 duced was R. maximum, indigenous in eastern North 

 America, which flowered for the first time in London 

 in 1756. A few years later (1763) R. ponticum was 

 introduced and was followed in 1803 by R. caucasi- 

 cum. The American R. catawbiense was introduced 

 by John Fraser about 1809, and was common in gar- 

 dens in 1838. Here are the beginnings of the Rhodo- 



