230 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



conclusion, and if I can keep your interest fresh until that time 

 I shall feel amply rewarded. 



The collection of these beautiful autumn flowers now at 

 Chiswick is by far the finest I have ever seen brought together 

 in any one garden. They have been gathered from all the known 

 sources in Great Britain, and as far as possible, to facilitate the 

 naming, the English forms have been planted side by side with a 

 series of presumably wild or authenticated types. These latter 

 are from Kew, and from the Harvard Botanic Gardens in America, 

 long the headquarters of the veteran botanist Dr. Asa Gray. 

 Ample material has been collected to show the great advance 

 effected by cultivation ; some of the forms, indeed, have been so 

 far improved that there is nothing quite like them among the 

 wild types. A few of the American group, as you are aware, 

 are better known under cultivation than in a wild state, notably 

 A. versicolor, A. patulus, A. diffusus var. liorizontalis , and 

 A. Icevigatus (which last you will know better as A. longifolius 

 formosus). Of all these we are told there are few, if any, 

 authenticated wild specimens existing; and, however distinct these 

 may be now, there is little difficulty, in the presence of so much 

 decided variation, in believing that, in the days gone by, they 

 have been manipulated by the gardener from the raw material, 

 the identification of which we will leave to the botanist. We 

 have come to a similar conclusion with several plants that have 

 been growing in the Chiswick Gardens since the old days of 

 hardy flowers, and especially with one called A.eminens. I have 

 not the slightest idea as to which species it should be placed 

 under. It is, however, a beautiful dwarf bushy form, and will 

 certainly be a favourite rock-plant. 



The late Dr. Asa Gray made a life-study of the genus Aster, 

 and although he had all the wild American species at his fingers' 

 ends, he was very much puzzled and troubled with the forms he 

 found in English gardens ; he named and renamed a particular 

 plant a dozen times before he was finally satisfied as to its 

 identity. Most genera that have been long cultivated in gardens 

 are a source of great trouble to the systematist. Confusion arises 

 from even the slight changes that take place under cultivation ; 

 but when we begin raising these cultivated forms from seed, 

 selecting as we do the forms that tend to vary in a particular 

 direction, we are making the work of the botanist a very trouble- 



