TWO-LEAVED PINES 53 
group—at home, mind you, not abroad—has had 
meted out to it all round about as castigating a dose 
of ‘“‘ damnation with faint praise ” as ever fell to the 
lot of any misfortunate man, beast, or plant upon 
earth, the Pinaster, on the other hand, has been the 
lucky recipient of praises sung by poets, of thanks- 
giving lip-service expressed by growers, and of high 
hopes entertained by theorists. 
Whether there is any mysterious property of air 
and climate that gives an enabling power to the 
tree, that boasts one whorl of branchlets, buds, and 
cones per annum, to prosper in our island home, 
and withholds it from the other little coterie, that 
goes one better in this direction and produces more 
than one whorl per annum, we dare not hazard 
opinion. Nothing under a Royal Commission—and 
most Royal Commissions indulge in a minority report 
—appointed by the Board of Agriculture would dare 
essay a final pronouncement on this question, but 
appearances rather point that way. Possibly their 
finding would be that whereas most of the Banksia, 
five out of seven, come from the Atlantic side of 
America, and those districts that Professor Sargent 
in his conspectus marks out under the letter A, and 
describes as north-eastern, only one of the Pinasters 
comes from that tabooed district, and that is the 
P. Resinosa, which alone of them is labelled as 
unsatisfactory here. 
Of the Banksia and the seven (without varieties) 
enumerated as belonging to it, only two appear 
to be moderately hardy, while of the Pinaster 
group, with its formidable array of independent 
varieties (i.e. the Austrian numbered as a variety of 
the Corsican), all except the P. Resinosa, and that 
ominously from the fatal Atlantic side of America, 
are good growers with us. 
