The months in which most species are in flower are April and 

 May and most of the collections on which our knowledge of the 

 flora is based were gathered in those months. 



Sources of information regarding the flora. — It may be said, in the 

 first place, that no information of any kind has been or can be col- 

 lected from Chinese sources, which could be usefully included in the 

 kind of Flora expected by western readers. The foundation of 

 this Flora is the Colonial Herbarium at Hongkong, to which refer- 

 ence has already been made. The Kwangtung material therein has 

 practically all been collected by the European officers of the Botan- 

 ical and Forestry Department and their Chinese assistants. Such 

 records in the works enumerated below as were additional to the 

 herbarium records have been included with them in the list. Special 

 mention must be made of Forbes and Hemsley's " Enumeration " 

 which has been utilised largely throughout. The Kwantung 

 records in the herbaria of Kew and the British Museum are taken 

 up usually on that authority alone, as no collections from the pro- 

 vince of any importance have been added to them since the 

 publication of the work. 



There are, however, several large collections on the continent which 

 remain to be searched for Kwangtung records. The herbarium, 

 for instance, of the late Drake del Castillo contains many collections 

 of Kwangtung plants. They, with the rest of his herbarium, were 

 bequeathed to the Museum dHHistoire Naturelle, but owing to want 

 of space at the Jardin des Plantes they still lie at his house in Paris, 

 where they can be seen on application. The Paris Herbarium itself 

 has not been consulted : it doubtless contains much material which 

 would add to our knowledge, of the provincial flora. 



The principal books from which information was derived were : 



Bentham's Flora Hongkongensis. 



Forbes and Hemsley's Enum. PL China. 



Finet and Gagnepain's Flore de TAsie Orientale. 



Miquel in Journ. de Bat. Nderl. i. (Krone's plants.) 



Journal of Botany. 



Hooker's Icones Plantarum. 



Keio Bulletin. 

 Extent of information. — The relative amount of attention that each 

 part of the province has received may be gathered from the 

 following comparison between the numbers of records from each, 

 which are quoted in the following pages. Out of each 100 records, 

 23, on an average, are found to refer to Hongkong (chiefly from 

 Ford, Hance, Tutcher), 15 to the New Territory (Ford, Dunn, 

 Tutcher), 11 to the Swatow hinterland (Dunn), 10 to the Jiienchow 

 River (Ford, B. C. Henry), five each to Canton {Hance, ISampson), 

 Lofoushan {Ford chiefly), N. Eiver (Sampson, Ford), W. River 

 (Hance) and Macao ( Vachell), four to Hoifung (Dunn's Chinese 

 collector), and 12 to other parts. 



Character of flora. — A visitor landing on the shore of Kwangtung — 

 the only part of the coast of China washed by tropical seas — first 

 notices that the maritime phanerogamic flora is distinctly poor, the 

 only element perhaps of the S. China flora which does not seem 

 remarkably rich to the European visitor. On sandy beaches a closc 

 turf usually commences from the high water line varied by patches 



