ON SCENTED PELARGONIUMS. 



499 



by those who- keep their eyes open. Only last month I came across 

 two beauties in my own village, after having, as I thought, explored 

 every garden and window in the place. 



Still, up to the 'fifties there must have been people who were 

 interested in their cultivation, for those years saw the invention of the 

 " Shrubland " Series — ' Shrubland Pet,' * Shrubland Eose,' * Shottis- 

 ham Hero, ' and possibly my * Lothario ' and * Touchstone. ' They were 

 the productions of the well-known horticulturist, David Beaton, who 

 was, I believe, gardener to Sir William Middleton, Shrublands, 

 Ipswich, hence the name of the varieties. 



So much for the history. And let me sum up this section with 

 this bit of advice: " Keep your eyes open wherever you go, especially 

 when passing cottage-windows. " 



2. Collecting. — The first step in starting a collection is to follow the 

 classic advice of Mrs. Glass's cookery-book: " First catch your hare." 

 As to the way to accomplish this. All collectors are proverbially 

 brazen, and I myself plead guilty to having been extremely — shall we 

 say metallic? — in some of my doings. Harmless old ladies have been 

 assailed on their own hearthstones and blandished into selling treasured 

 plants. Perfect strangers, who have for their sins possessed a coveted 

 specimen, have been bombarded with begging letters. Kind friends 

 have been badgered till they must have been sick of the sound of my 

 name. And all have treated me with consideration and courtesy, with 

 the exception of one old woman in a Belgian village, who drove me 

 from her door with contumely, asking if I thought she was going, for 

 the sake of my dirty silver, to rob " Le Bon Dieu " of a plant — and 

 such a plant — which was destined to figure in the Corpus Christi 

 Festival the following week. As I draw the line at committing 

 sacrilege, even to get hold of a new specimen, I departed with my tail 

 between my legs, and regret harrowing my soul. 



So perhaps my experience No. 2 may be summed up thus : " Don't 

 stick at trifles, and don't be shy of asking." For up till now it has 

 been impossible to buy specimens from nursery -gardeners ; either they 

 have not got them, or those they have are named wrongly. The only 

 chance hitherto has been the courtesy and charity of fellow-collectors 

 which I have always found to be unbounded, provided one asks politely 

 and personally. I have reasons of my own for emphasizing this 

 last point. 



3. Classification. — This brings me to one of the great difficulties of 

 forming a collection. 



There are a certain number of groups of Pelargoniums whose 

 parentage and antiquity are beyond dispute. Of these the Gucullatums 

 head the list with P. cucullatum of the date 1690, which a lady from 

 the Cape told me at the Eoyal International Horticultural Exhibition 

 grows all over Table Mountain. This I believe to be the parent of 

 most of the Show Pelargoniums. 



The next oldest group seem to be the Oapitatums, of which the 

 somewhat rare variety I have is, I believe, the ancestor, introduced 



K K 2 



