30 
boretum of this variety is unusually full of flowers this year. Several 
of the Horse chestnut- trees with red and yellow flowers are handsome 
when in flower. They are natural hybrids which originated in Europe, 
some of them more than a century ago, between the yellow- flowered 
American Aesculus octandra and one of the red-flowered southern 
Buckeyes. The name of this hybrid is Aesculus versicolor. It appears 
to have been better known in gardens before the middle of the last 
century than it is now. There is a large tree of this hybrid in a gar- 
den near the corner of Pond and Eliot Streets, Jamaica Plain. Three 
Magnolias of the southern Appalachian Mountains, Magnolia Fraseri, 
M. tripetala and M. cordata, are also unusually full of flowers this 
year. With the exception of these and the Horsechestnuts the tree in 
the Arboretum now most conspicuous for its abundant and beautiful 
flowers is 
Cornus controversa. This is a widely distributed tree in Japan, 
Korea and western China. In western Szech’uan Wilson photographed 
a specimen sixty feet high with a trunk seven feet in girth. In the 
Cornus collection on the right-hand side of the Meadow Road plants 
raised from seeds collected in western China by Wilson in 1907 are now 
in bloom, but the largest of these Cornels in the Arboretum is in the 
Peters’ Hill Nursery. This plant was sent here in 1913 by the Park 
Department of the City of Rochester, New York; it is now about 
twenty-five feet high with a short trunk and a head twenty-six feet in 
diameter; the branches are long, crowded, and spread at right angles 
with the stem, drooping slightly at the ends, the lowest sweeping the 
ground. The upper side of the branches is thickly covered with the 
flat flower-clusters six or seven inches in diameter, and raised on erect 
stems. The flowers are white or white faintly tinged with yellow, and 
are followed by black shining fruits which are eaten by the birds as 
fast as they ripen. As it grows on Peters’ Hill this Cornel is a mag- 
nificent plant and the handsomest of the genus in the Arboretum with 
the exception of the species with white floral bracts represented here 
by Cornus florida and C. kousa. To the student of botanical geogra- 
phy Cornus controversa is interesting as another living witness of the 
relationship between the floras of eastern Asia and eastern North Amer- 
ica. For in the genus Cornus with many species there are but two 
with alternate leaves, Cornus controversa in eastern Asia and C. alter - 
nifolia in eastern North America. Cornus controversa was growing in 
the Veitchs’ Nursery near London in 1880, but it has remained little 
known or understood in gardens owing to a confusion of this species 
with Cornus macrophylla, a Himalayan and eastern Asiatic tree with 
opposite leaves. Other trees which add beauty and interest to the Ar- 
boretum at this time are three Viburnums, the eastern American V. 
prunifolium, which has already dropped its flowers, and V. Lentago, 
and the Japanese V. Sieboldii. Not many small trees are more useful 
than these American Viburnums for the decoration of American parks 
and gardens, and fortunately nurserymen realize this fact and now 
grow them in large quantities, especially V. Lentago. The flowers of 
V. prunifolium are whiter than those of V. Lentago which are faintly 
tinged with yellow, but the flower-clusters and the leaves of the latter 
are larger. V. prunifolium is more inclined to grow with a single 
trunk than V. Lentago which is often a large arborescent shrub. 
