10 
isolated individuals has been found, but most of the species are now 
established here and some of them have bloomed for several years. 
This year the trees promise to produce an unusually large crop of 
flowers and a visit to them will be well repaid. 
Prunus concinna. This little Cherry, which was discovered by Wilson 
on the mountains of central China at altitudes above the sea of from 
twelve to fifteen hundred feet, is the first Cherry to bloom in the 
Arboretum this year. In its native forests it is a shrub five or six 
\ feet tall, but here it is treelike in habit, although only three or four 
feet high, with a straight stem, and is now as thickly covered with 
flowers as it is possible for a plant to be covered. The flowers, which 
appear before the leaves, are in few-flowered clusters and are white 
with a wine-colored calyx. The red, lustrous, loose bark of the stem 
of this Cherry is attractive but as a flowering plant it is less valu- 
able than the Japanese Prunus subhirteLla, under which name it was 
once distributed by a London nurseryman. Prunus concinna can be 
seen in the collection of Chinese shrubs on the southern slope of Bus- 
sey Hill. 
Prunus tomentosa. Until this year the earliest of the Cherries to 
bloom in the Arboretum, Prunus tomentosa is a native of China and a 
shrub only five or six feet high, and when fully grown in abundant 
space for the spread of its branches often broader than tall. The 
flowers open from pink buds as the leaves begin to unfold, and the 
bright red stalks and calyx make a handsome contrast with the white 
petals. The small fruit ripens in June and is scarlet, covered with 
short hairs, and is sweet and of good flavor. This shrub is very hardy 
and flourishes and produces its fruit in dry cold regions like Alberta 
and the Dakotas, and in such regions it is possible it may develop in- 
to an important fruit-producing plant. Prunus tomentosa is a native of 
northern China and was raised in the Arboretum twenty-five years 
• ago from seed sent here from Peking. A form discovered in western 
China by Wilson (var. endotricha) is also established in the Arboretum. 
This blooms rather later than the northern plant and the fruit is des- 
titute or nearly destitute of hairs. The white-flowered form much 
cultivated in Tokyo is not in the Arboretum collection. 
Prunus subhirtella. This is the Japanese Spring Cherry which Mr. 
Wilson, after a year devoted in Japan to the study of Cherry-trees, 
calls “the most floriferous and perhaps the most delightful of all Jap- 
anese Cherries.” It is a large, low-branched shrub rather than a tree 
and is not known as a wild plant. This Cherry is much planted in 
western Japan from northern Hondo southward, but it is not much 
grown in the eastern part of the Empire and is rarely found in Tokyo 
gardens. For this reason and as it does not reproduce itself from seed 
Prunus subhirtella is still rare in American and European collections. 
There are large plants in the Arboretum collection where they have 
been growing since 1894 and where, covered with their drooping pink 
flowers, they are objects of wonderful beauty. The value of Prunus 
