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CAPE FLOWERS. 
By Mrs. Wilfred Durrant. 
shelves of our greenhouses and conservatories are 
many beautiful flowers and plants, whose 
1^,03 original homes may be many hundred miles distant 
from England. All the countries on the globe have 
contributed their quota to our floral wealth, and as we explore 
new continents and colonise new districts, so do we find a new 
and distinct set of plants, which by artificial means and care 
may be made to flourish in our little island. 
South Africa has furnished not only a goodly number of 
plants but also some of the most fragrant. Heaths were brought 
over by the earliest explorers ; and pelargoniums, cinerarias, 
and new and beautiful varieties of lobelias and marigolds. 
Besides these more familiar plants, the steady stream of 
greenhouse favourites has not ceased from the middle of the 
eighteenth century. The list is always being increased, both 
by diligent flower lovers and by the enterprising and energetic 
agents of the great nurserymen. 
One of the most common flowers of the Cape is the Cape 
everlasting-flower, so widely known as Immortelles and used 
so much for funeral wreaths. I think I was never so struck 
by the flower, as when it was forced on my notice by its pro- 
fusion, mixed with box twigs, on the graves in Pere la Chaise. 
A great quantity of these Immortelles are exported and find a 
home in France. There All Souls’ Day is the great festival for 
remembering the dead by means of these wreaths and crosses. 
The little heads of flowers are the dried chaffy blooms of 
Helichrysum arenaritim, a hardy plant of the daisy tribe. It was 
introduced to Europe about 1739. It is most abundant at the 
Cape, loving the sunny sandy soil, and nearly as ubiquitous 
there as our bright little daisy in England. The old writer, 
Theophrastus, mentions the plant. 
The African lily, or Agapanthus umhellatus, is a fairly common 
plant now among us, sometimes planted out in our gardens, at 
other times in large tubs or boxes. Its fine head of cornflower- 
blue blossoms on a long slender green stalk, towering from 
encasing folds of sword-shaped leaves, is generally known. It 
is said to have been cultivated in the Royal Gardens of Hampton 
Court Palace, as early as 1692. 
The golden Tritonias are very often seen in bunches in the 
florist’s windows. The flowers are of a fine burnished copper- 
coloured ground, shading off to pale citron-yellow. The truss, 
as the technical term is for the spike of blooms, consists of a 
few loose blossoms with plume-shaped buds on a long thin 
slender stalk surrounded at the base with graceful lance-like 
leaves. The name Triton comes from the Greek for weather- 
