On the Cultivation of Rare Plants. 



Mr. Brown has very justly observed, in his Prodromus, 

 that this plant is not a Uvularia ; and I had prepared a ge- 

 neric character and description of it for the Paradisus Lon- 

 dinensis, when Mr. Sydenham Edwards's excellent figure, 

 in the Botanical- Magazine, rendered another unnecessary. 

 It is easily cultivated, and will probably succeed in the 

 open ground. 



ALSTROEMERE.E. 

 Vandesia Edulis. MSS. Alstroemeria Edulis. Lam- 

 bert in Bot. Rep. n. 649- cum Ic.—Tussac. Fl. Ant. p. 109. 

 t. 14. 



I have named this genus, which contains many species, 

 after Madame La Comtesse de Vandes, whose collection 

 of rare exotics, near Bayswater, is so liberally open to bota- 

 nists. The Vandesia Edulis flowered and ripened seeds in her 

 stove, for the first time in England last year ; having been sent 

 to Thomas Evans, Esq. from the Botanic garden in the Island 

 of St. Vincent, in 1806. Monsieur de Tussac tells us, that he 

 discovered it in shady places of the mountains near Cape Fran- 

 cois, in the Island ot St. Domingo, where the inhabitants eat 

 the globular tubers which terminate the fibres of its root, 

 boiling them, as we do potatoes. I am not certain, however, 

 that any of these tubers will produce a plant, for they re- 

 semble those of many Pelargoniums, and have no buds upon 

 them ; but by dividing the branches of the root above the 

 tubers, where there is a bud, as in Alstroemeria, it may cer- 

 tainly be increased. Each root should be planted in a pot 

 of light rich earth plunged in front of the bark-bed, where 

 the stems, which arise in succession, must be suffered to wind 



