220 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



garden a leafy plant a yard high, with flowers hardly larger than 

 those of B. acris. Similar changes, perhaps less in degree, take 

 place in nearly half the plants we bring home from mountains 

 and rocks. But it is not so with all ; for instance, Banunculus 

 amplexicaulis, dug up by me in the same mountain home as 

 B. Gouani, produces year after year larger flowers than I ever 

 saw upon it in the Pyrenees. We must not, therefore, conclude 

 what a plant will do in cultivation without the test of experience. 

 Many wild plants when raised in gardens from seed show a re- 

 markable increase of stature ; instances of this are Campanula 

 glomerata and Veronica spicata, both of which I have grown at 

 least three feet high. But to many of our most beautiful native 

 plants, cultivation, as I have defined it, is an abhorrence. Blue 

 Chicory and Viper's Bugloss will not produce in garden beds the 

 colour they show on barren chalk banks, and Cardims acaulis, so 

 beautiful on the South Downs, degenerates at once in cultivation, 

 developing long stalks. Some things, which soon die when I 

 transfer them to my garden, seem to require the competition of 

 other roots ; such are the common Polygala, the Winter Greens 

 (Pyrola), and Orchis Morio. 



(2) Change in colour of the flower. Of real change of 

 colour in an individual plant I have had no case in my ex- 

 perience. The damp soil and sunless climate of my garden often 

 make flowers deficient in their proper colour. Delphiniums 

 come washy purple instead of clear blue. What came as a blue 

 Primrose from a friend's garden is in mine a dull red. Such 

 colours run or fail, but are not really changed. The real changes 

 in colour said to be due to cultivation are those we see in the 

 coloured Primroses and Polyanthus, the Dutch Hyacinth, the 

 varieties of Pyrethrum roseum, &c. All my experience proves 

 that the first change of colour, ending in the divers shades of 

 florists' flowers, is as likely to take place in nature as in a garden, 

 though less likely to be observed, and for obvious reasons less 

 likely to be perpetuated. I have corners in my garden where the 

 common wild Primrose, or where the Bardfield Oxlip is allowed 

 to seed and grow in cultivated soil, and from time to time the 

 soil is renewed and the plants thinned. Now and then flowers 

 are produced of a dull pale red ; but these, if not separated, soon 

 disappear again. Wherever Primroses abound in a wild state I 

 have now and then seen these dull red flowers, as well as some 



