54 FAMILIAR GASBEA" FLOWERS. 



of London, for with the return of the chrysanthemum 

 season Stoke Newington was "in everybody's mouth." 

 Alas ! history will not keep to established grooves ; this 

 model society has become " National," and the flower, 

 through the growth of its renown, has actually lost one 

 of its most picturesque associations. 



Pictorial art in China and Japan owes much of its life 

 to the chrysanthemum and the pseony. These flowers are 

 seen on their splendid pottery, and in the fantastic pictures 

 of the native artists, in all possible degrees of naturalism 

 and conventionalism, both flowers happily lending them- 

 selves to the invention that likes to make a toy of the 

 truth. The chrysanthemum is in both countries a greater 

 favourite than the pseony ; and it must be confessed that, 

 while we have derived from China and Japan the parents 

 of our finest varieties and the types of the most distinctive 

 forms, we are not the less indebted to them for the lessons 

 that are the basis of our chrysanthemum cultivation. From 

 the Chinese our gardeners have learned the art of pro- 

 ducing specimen flowers of the most finished " incurved " 

 form, such as the figure of Jarclin des Plantes accompany- 

 ing these remarks may suggest to the reader. For a full- 

 sized specimen the size of the page does not suffice, for 

 we are familiar with flowers that could not be put into a 

 man's hat,' so large are they. 



The Chinese chrysanthemum was first accurately de- 

 scribed by Breynius, in his " Prodromus," 1689, under the 

 name of Matricaria Japonica maxima, and he states that six 

 varieties were at that time in cultivation in Holland. It re- 

 ceived its present botanical name of Chrysanthemum Indicam 

 from Linnaeus, whose " Species Plantarum " first appeared 

 in the year 1753. The first specimen known to have been 



