]25 
ERICA MACNABIAN A. 
(mr. macnab's heath.) 
CLASS. ORDER. 
OCTANDRIA. MONOGYNIA. 
NATURAL ORDER. 
ERICACEAE. 
Generic Character. — Vide Vol. vi. p. 3. 
Specific Character A hybrid plant, with hard-wooded branches, short, dense, imbricated, partially re- 
flexed foliage, and very long, tubular, pink-coloured flowers, which are inflated towards the lower end. 
The taste for cultivating certain classes of plants, like every other popular pro- 
pensity, would almost appear divisible into particular cycles, during which it 
increases or declines, attains its utmost universality or degenerates into complete 
listlessness, in a variously progressive order. Such, at least, has been the case with 
Heaths in the last few years. About the commencement of the last decade, or for 
a short term immediately succeeding the year 1832, they were exalted to a very 
high position in most collections. Since that time, a notion of their intractability 
to simple treatment, and their tendency to perish suddenly if at all disregarded, has 
become so current, that only a minority of noble growers kept up their collection 
with the necessary spirit, or possessed plants whose culture merited anything short 
of reprehension. 
"We have real pleasure in stating, however, that this feeling was not destined 
for continued existence, and that both gardeners and amateurs are now very gene- 
rally relieved of so ignoble an impression. In the absence of any better criterion, 
we usually form our conclusions as to the degree of estimation in which any tribe 
of flowers is held, by the attention it receives in the different nurseries. These 
establishments almost invariably take their tone in accordance with public desires. 
Far from speaking this disrespectfully of any firm, we are confident that it ever 
must be so ; and directly a commercial gentleman begins to devote attention to a 
