ON THE CULTIVATION" OP PLEEOMA ELEaANS. 
269 
necessary, in order to deter the inexperienced from being misled, to object to a flower — 
then honestly giving my reasons for such objection. I speak the truth, regardless of who 
may be the raiser, grower, or seller of it ; such has ever been my unvarying practice, and 
such it will remain while I have the honour of appearing before the readers of the 
" Magazine of Gardening and Botany," as one of the servants of Flora. 
ON THE CULTIVATION OF PLEROMA ELEGANS. 
By G. T. 
Eespecting the management of this splendid native of the Organ Mountains of Brazil, 
to the rich velvety purple hue of whose blossoms Sir William Hooker has well observed, 
" no pencil can do justice," scarcely sufficient is known, as so few specimens are found in 
a good flowering condition. 
From the time of its introduction to this country, in 1841, by Messrs. Veitch of Exeter, 
through the agency of their talented collector, Mr. W. Lobb, this beautiful exotic has been 
all but universally treated as an evergreen stove-plant. Nor should this circumstance 
surprise us much, when we come to reflect that Pleroma elegans is a Brazilian Melastomad; 
that of twenty-eight genera belonging to the Melastomaceous order, enumerated in " Sweet's 
Hortus Britannicus," twenty-seven are there recognised as inhabitants of the stove (all the 
species of the remaining genus, Rhexia, being hardy herbaceous perennials) ; and moreover, 
that of these twenty-seven genera again, upwards of a hundred species require the tem- 
perature of a stove to cultivate them with success. 
Of the genus Melastoma itself, approximating so closely to Pleroma in some respects, 
that a species or two of the latter are by some botanists synonymised with the former ; 
there is but one species of our acquaintance {M. macrocarpa or M. malabathrica of some bota- 
nists,) a purple flowering evergreen shrub, from China, that is occasionally met with under 
greenhouse culture, the rest being stove-plants ; and yet there is a profuse blooming species 
invariably grown in stoves, that I have known to succeed admirably when planted in the 
open border of the flower garden, in summer, and requires no greater amount of heat than 
the cold greenhouse would supply in winter ; and some such result, no doubt, which induced 
the experiment of planting in the open air a denizen of the hothouse, has at length taught 
us how to grow, and how, in profusion, to flower the splendid plant we are inviting greater 
attention to, and which, if we may presume to employ the expressive language of a learned 
professor, has been " coddled in the stove " until those who possess it can induce no quantity 
of florescence, and therefore become impatient with the encomiastic remarks which induced 
them, in the first instance, to purchase a plant. 
What we shall presently relate of this elegant Pleroma it is probable may happen anon 
fvith the much-bufl!'etted Plumbago Larpenta; at least, now that the management of the 
former is beginning to be rightly understood, it should induce those who may have been 
hasty to condemn the latter to suspend their judgment yet awhile, and incite others to 
experimentalise, in order that its true requirements, and the " conditions essential to the 
most perfect cultivation " may be investigated and discovered. 
Many, doubtless very many plants, that have long had for their dwelling-place the 
stifling, debilitating, and not improbably degenerating atmosphere of the " stove," a place 
exclusively in times gone by, and even now-and-then to be met with, for deciduous, ever- 
green, and bulbous rooted plants, annual, biennial, and perennial species assembled from 
climes where the influence of the sun is felt most potently, as well as from diflerent zones of 
climate ; doubtless, w^e repeat, very many such subjects as these, long " coddled in the 
stove," as yet displaying none, or but very little, of their native splendour, and existing 
rather as so many encumbrances there, will, in due time, like Pleroma elegans, either by 
accident or design, find their way out of it into situations, more consonant with their 
habits, more conducive to the development of their natural beauties, or, in short, more 
