TREATMENT OF TECOMA GRANDIFLORA. 
89 
durableness, and liberal succession of its flowers, stamp it as a peculiar 
desideratum. 
If we have not in the foregoing enumeration alluded to a great number of plants 
that might possibly thrive in the border before described, it is because we preferred 
specifying those which experience has proved to be actually susceptive of culture 
in the open air. 
TREATMENT OF TECOMA GRANDIFLORA, 
By "dividing the vegetable kingdom into classes, according to the comparative 
excellence or worthlessness of the immensely diversified objects composing it, tliere 
will be found an exceedingly limited number worthy of being grown by the great 
mass of cultivators, and, at the same time, capable of accommodating themselves 
to an extensive variety of temperature and other circumstances. In proportion, 
therefore, to their fewness, and their high intrinsic value, a stronger necessity exists 
for making them universally familiar ; and it is with this design that we purpose 
recording the properties of a plant which has been too long neglected, and which is 
scarcely ever observable in any but a displeasing and shabby state. 
The species of Tecoma were formerly included in the genus Bigmnia^ to which 
they have the strongest affinity in habit, and in the form and disposition of their 
flowers ; but the capsules or seed-vessels of Bignonia have a partition which runs 
parallel with the valves by which they open when ripe, while that of the capsules 
of Tecoma takes a contrary direction. The species on which we are now writing, 
though often called in nurseries and gardens Bignonia grandiflora^ is properly a 
Tecoma. 
T. grandiflora inhabits the vast regions of China and Japan, from whence it was 
conveyed to Britain about forty years back. It is not much unlike T. radicans in 
the size and colour of its branches, but does not grow quite so luxuriantly and 
rapidly, nor does it climb so readily. Like that species, also, it develops its 
flowers from the ends of the shoots ; the panicles being, however, more lax, the 
individual blossoms pendulous instead of erect, the limb of the corolla more spreading, 
three times as large, and of a colour internally between orange and crimson, with 
dark streaks in the throat, and a light yellowish brown exterior. 
It is an amusing fact, yet not altogether creditable to the parties concerned, that 
when a plant has, by absolute ill-treatment, been brought into an infertile and un- 
ornamental condition, it is forthwith denounced as a shy bloomer, and too unpro- 
ductive of blossoms to merit growing. Such has been exactly the history of T. 
grandiflora. By some unaccountable negligence, the splendour of its flowers has 
been lost sight of, and it has been sufi"ered to languish on in that half-dead, half- 
dying condition, to which every person is aware it is so easy to reduce the most 
magnificent climbing plants. 
VOL. VIII.— NO. LXXXVIII. N 
