TRADESCAN'TIA SPICATA. 
SPIKED SPIDERWORT. 
Order. 
MONOGYNIA. 
Natural Order. 
COMMELINACE.E. 
Native of 
Height. 
Flowers in 
Duration. 
Introduced 
Mexico. 
3§ feet. 
September. 
Perennial. 
in 1837. 
No. 770. 
John Tradescant, after whom this genus was 
named, is reported to have been a Dutchman by 
birth. At what period he came to England is not 
recorded, but it is mentioned in Dr. Poulteney’s 
Sketches that he obtained the title of Gardener to 
Charles I, about the year 1629. There are but few 
men who have possessed the ardent love of science 
which characterized the life of Tradescant. He 
travelled to various parts of Europe, Africa, and 
the islands of the Mediterranean, collecting not 
plants alone, but a variety of productions both of 
nature and art. Parkinson, in his notice of the Tra- 
descantia Virginica (Paradisus Terrestris, 152) 
says “ This Spiderwort is of late knowledge, and 
for it the Christian world is indebted much to that 
painful industrious searcher and lover of all nature’s 
varieties, John Tradescant, who hath imparted 
hereof, as of many other things, both to me and 
others.” He had a garden at Lambeth, and there 
also was his Museum, the first general collection of 
the works of nature and art which had ever been 
made in this country — it was the curiosity of the 
age, and both visited and enriched by royalty and 
Class. 
HEXANDRIA. 
