EARUEK HISTORY OK OUR DOGBANES. — I. 247 



Not SO far removed from what must be the typical A. andro.- 

 saemifoliuvi is a plant which, a dozen or fifteen years earlier 

 than the work of Bigelow, had been figured and described 

 under that same name in Curtis' Botanical Magazine, t. 280, 

 and with an instructive account of the origin of the subject 

 from which the drawing was made. Some such plant, though 

 not Curtis' type, had been known in English gardens for sixty 

 or seventy years anterior to the publication of the plate in the 

 Botanical Magazine. Philip Miller had given an account of 

 it in the first edition of the Gardener's Dictionary (l73l), and 

 Morison had described and figured it thirty years earlier, 

 though whether from the plant as grown in England or on 

 the Continent I am unable to say ; but presumably that early 

 accession of it to English gardens had been derived either di- 

 rectly or mediately from the original stock in the Paris Garden. 

 This plant of the early Botanical Magazine is of quite another 

 origin, for, though Curtis takes it to be specifically the same 

 thing, the specimens he had were grown in England from seed 

 sent from the neighborhood of Halifax, N. S., at a date then — 

 that is, in 1794 — quite recent. This figure, perhaps the most 

 life-like and beautiful that has hitherto been produced as 

 representing an apocynum, is in all essentials like that of 

 Boccone (1674) and of Morison (1699). It shows a plant of 

 ovate and truly androsaemious foliage — true to that even as to 

 the dark-green color — and what may well be called a terminal 

 cymose panicle of flowers. True indeed, one of the four 

 cymes is axillary to one of the leaves, yet that one is raised 

 on a long peduncle and so made fairly a part of the panicle. 

 All are borne away beyond the leaves. Within a period of 

 130 years between 1664 (Paris Gard.) and 1794, that which is 

 the very type of A. androsaemifolium was in the gardens of 

 Europe, often described, and three times figured. Then in 

 the first half of the nineteenth century the same was excellently 

 represented in the Herbier de 1' Amateur (1829) and in the 

 Belgique Horticole (1850). 



As regards this particular American dogbane, by name the 

 oldest of them all, the sum of the matter is this ; that the 



