OF SHRUBS, MOSTLY EVERGREEN 27 



happened ! Nothing could well have saved us from 

 MuUigania. Which leads me to a despairing proposition. 

 Fitting, fair, and honourable it is (as Sir John Hooker 

 points out) that great gardeners,' explorers, lovers of these 

 delights, should be commemorated and honoured in the 

 names of flowers. But Sir John slides over the great 

 difficulty of the question : we are not all Magnols, and 

 since no man has power over his own name, and since 

 a lovely, floral soul may be clothed in such syllables as 

 Smee or O'Higgins, why not alter our system of nomen- 

 clature, and avoid the danger of having to damn a plant 

 eternally under the style and title of O'Higginsia or Smeea.'' 

 There is actually — think of it ! — a rock-garden plant 

 called Boehninghausenia. On the same principle, too, 

 mountains great, divine and glorious, must be saved 

 from the indignity of being labelled Mount Baker or 

 Mount Bullock Workman. My plan would be to adopt 

 the Japanese, the savage principle, of naming for fitness ; 

 and, when a plant comes up for name, my compliment to 

 the great horticulturist would take the form, not of ask- 

 ing him or her to stand god-parent to a possible Bullock- 

 WorJcmannia Fanniae, but of giving him the right to 

 choose the novelty's name himself. Personally I should 

 value this right far moi"e than the ascription of a species 

 under my own syllables, and take more pleasure in regis- 

 tering Saxifraga Gloria than Saxtfraga Farreri. 



Azalea, then, leads off^ with Azalea procumbens, which, 

 to be correct, ought to be spoken of rather as Loiseleurla 

 procumbens. The Alpine Azalea is the strangest and, I 

 think, with the exception oi Pyxidanthera and Andromeda 

 hypnoeides, the smallest of all northern shrubs. It is as 

 flat as any lichen or any starved mat of thyme. Indeed, 

 but that its tiny leaves are leathery, bright green and 

 glossy, the plant is not unlike a thin tangle of wild thyme. 

 On this appear, in spring, abundant flowers, gazing upwards 



