343 DECIDUOUS TREES. 



varieties both of JEsculus and Pavia. This sort can scarcely be 

 said to be in cultivation in the nurseries, notwithstanding its claims 

 to a place in every collection of ornamental trees." * 



The Dwarf White-flowering Horse-chestnut. P. mac- 

 rostachia. — This superb spreading shrub was first brought promi- 

 nently before the public in this country by H. W. Sargent, in his 

 Appendix to Downing's Landscape Gardening, where it is enthusi- 

 astically described, and admirably pictured. He thus mentions a 

 specimen in his own grounds. " Our best plant at Wodenethe, 

 twelve years old, is sixty feet in circumference and about eight feet 

 high, and has, at the time we write, between three and four hundred 

 racemes of flowers, the feathery lightness of which, and the fine 

 umbrageous character of the leaves, render it a most striking and 

 attractive object." It comes into bloom late in June, and con- 

 tinues blooming a long time. 



The California Buckeye, ^sculus californica, is described in 

 the Pacific Railroad Survey as a low, spreading shrub or tree, eight 

 to twenty feet high ; " flowers rose-colored, racemes about six inches 

 long, from spring to midsummer." 



The following general remarks on the dwarf varieties are from 

 Loudon's Trees and Shrubs of Great Britain, page 134: "The 

 most valuable varieties of both ^sculus and Pavia are best per- 

 petuated by budding or grafting, and collectors ought always to 

 see that the plants they purchase have been worked. Pavia rubra 

 as a tree, P. discolor either as a shrub or grafted standard high, and 

 P. macrostachia as a shrub, ought to be in every collection, whether 

 small or large.f Pavia humilis, when grafted standard high on the 

 common horse-chestnut, forms an ornament at once singular and 

 beautiful. As the horse-chestnut is found on most plantations 



* Arboretum Britannicum, p. 473. 



t This remark probably applies the word " small " to parks of five to ten acres. Of course it 

 would be absurd to recom*pend that every owner of a half acre or acre, devoted to decorative 

 planting, in this country, should attempt to have a specimen of every fine variety: unless he 

 intends to use his entire ground to make a complete collection of some one species of tree 07 

 shrub only. 



