532 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
Rhododendrons with a list of hybrids, Cultivation, Rhododendrons for 
every month, and Gardens where Rhododendrons are an especial 
feature. 
"The Book of the Peony." By Mrs. Edward Harding. 8vo. 
259 pp. (Lippincott, London, 1917.) 25s. net. 
The first book devoted to the Paeony hales from America, where 
the cultivation of these glorious flowers of early summer has been 
taken up with an enthusiasm almost unknown on this side of the 
Atlantic, much as many of us appreciate their beauty and value in 
the garden. 
The text is both interesting and valuable ; the plates, both coloured 
(twenty in number) and black and white, are excellent ; the clear 
type, the ample margins, the rather old-fashioned paper, the uncut 
edges, all make a book the book-lover may desire, and the garden- 
lover wish to purchase for reference as well as for merely reading. 
What the French and English growers began to develop and 
carried to a great pitch, the American nurserymen have continued ; 
and where America has drawn much from our own country in the 
past, we may hope to be repaid by further beauties in the future, 
though we need not, with the incoming of new species of Paeonia 
from China and elsewhere, rest content with our laurels. 
The Tree Pseonies have not yet come to their own in England. 
Here and there we hear of wonderful successes with them. That 
remarkable plant in Mr. E. Taylor's garden in Norfolk, which, when 
eighty years of age and fifteen feet in diameter, bore 400 flowers, 
is enough to show what Paeonia Moutan at its best is capable of, 
and to make us wish to emulate the success there achieved. Perhaps 
the stock leaves something to be desired, for Tree Paeonies as pro- 
pagated in France are nearly always on P. albi flora stocks, and Japanese 
plants are grafted on wild P. Moutan. It may be, perhaps, that 
P. lutea will furnish a better stock, or P. Delavayi ; but, in any case, 
both these at present rather uncommon plants are well worth a place 
in our gardens. P. lutea has, as our readers know, produced more 
than one good hybrid with P. Moutan, none better so far than ' La 
Lorraine,' raised by M. Lemoine of Nancy, and exhibited in 1912. 
Useful keys, descriptions of species and of the varieties best 
known in cultivation, combine to make this an excellent monograph 
upon a very fine genus. 
" Cotton and Other Vegetable Fibres." By Ernest Goulding, D.Sc, F.I.C., 
with a preface by Wyndham R. Dunstan, C.M.G., LL.D., F.R.S., Director of 
the Imperial Institute. Imperial Institute series of Handbooks to the Com- 
mercial Resources of the Tropics. 8vo. 231 pp. (John Murray, London, 191 7.) 
Price 6s. net. 
Probably few persons not directly concerned in the trade are aware of the 
number of fibres of vegetable origin that enter into commerce, and perhaps still 
fewer are acquainted with the botanical and geographical origin of the supplies 
that reach this country. This may to some extent be accounted for by the 
fact that hitherto the literature on this subject has been scattered through 
technical journals and scientific works that have not been readily available to 
