A YEAR IN A GARDEN ON N.-W. COAST OF ROSS-SHIRE. 93 
grows and fruits so freely here. It requires wire netting to help it 
up, but I have two other more or less uncommon climbers, which run 
up the tree-stems without any help, and I can most strongly recom- 
mend them both to everyone. They are the climbing Hydrangea, 
commonly known by another awful name — viz. Schizophragma 
hydrangeoides , and the rather newer Chinese A ctinidia chinensis. These 
three climbers are entirely different the one from the other, but each 
one has its own great merits. 
The shrubberies do not look a bit wintry yet, as most of the New 
Zealand and Chilean shrubs and trees are evergreen, and even some 
of the deciduous trees, such as the Magnolias (and especially Magnolia 
Campbelli), are still in their summer dress, and one is only reminded 
of the actual lateness of the season by the early Narcissi and snow- 
drops showing up where the blackbirds have scratched their covering 
of leaves off them. 
Next to the Schizostylis, the brightest objects in the garden are 
big clumps, four feet high, of Fuchsia gracilis. They are still nearly 
at their best, while our hedges of Fuchsia Riccartoni, and the large- 
flowered Fuchsia globosa, are quite over. 
Another December flower struck me to-day as being very brilliant, 
and that was the intensely blue Lithospermum prostratum, which 
* does so well here, and which often flowers nearly as freely in January 
as in June. 
To show what our climate here is, I may finish up by mentioning 
that this is the 9th of December, and that there has not been as much 
as one degree of frost at Inverewe yet ! 
[The foregoing notes refer to the year 191 6. — Ed.] 
