43 
Syringa Sweginzowii is flowering well here this year as it has for 
two or three years. The leaves are dark dull green and sharply 
pointed, and the flowers are borne in long narrow clusters; they are 
delicately fragrant, half an inch long, with very slender corolla-tubes, 
and are flesh-colored in the bud, becoming nearly white after the buds 
open. This species flowers freely even as a small plant and is well 
worth a place in a collection of Lilacs. 
Syringa yunnanensis, although it is a native of southwestern China, 
is quite hardy in the Arboretum where it is flowering now for the 
fourth year. It is related, like ,most of the species of western China, 
to S. villosa and is a tall shrub of open habit with glabrous leaves pale 
on the lower surface and long narrow clusters of light flesh-colored or 
pink flowers. Geographically interesting, this plant is probably of less 
value as a garden plant than S. Sweginzowii. 
The Tree Lilacs. As the flowers of the late-flowering group of Lilacs 
fade the earliest flowers of the so-called Tree Lilacs begin to open. 
There are three of these Lilacs which all bear large clusters of white 
or yellowish white flowers with a corolla shorter than the stamens, 
while in other Lilacs the corolla is longer than the stamens which 
are hidden in its throat. The flowers of the Tree Lilacs all have 
the disagreeable odor of the flowers of the Privet, and the leaves fall 
in the autumn without change of color. The first of these plants to 
flower, S. amurensis, a native of eastern Siberia as its name implies, 
is a shrub in habit twelve or fifteen feet high with dark close bark, 
broad thick leaves dark green above and pale below, and short, broad, 
unsymmetrical flower-clusters. S. pekinensis from northern China 
flowers next. This is also shrubby in habit, sometimes twenty or thirty 
feet tall and broad, with stout, spreading stems covered with yellow- 
brown bark separating readily into thin plates like that of some of the 
Birch-trees, dark green, narrow, pointed leaves and short and unsym- 
metrical flower-clusters usually in pairs at the ends of the branches. 
This species holds its leaves later in the autumn than the others, and 
produces great quantities of flowers every year, the other species 
usually flowering abundantly only every other year. 
The last of the Tree Lilacs to flower, S. japonica, is a native of 
northern Japan, and is really a tree sometimes forty feet high with a 
tall straight trunk covered with lustrous brown bark like the bark of 
a Cherry-tree, a round-topped head of upright branches, broad, thick, 
dark green leaves, and erect, mostly symmetrical flower-clusters from 
twelve to eighteen inches long. This is one of the handsomest of the 
small trees which bloom here at the end of June or early in July. 
Cornus Kousa is a small tree which in eastern Asia enlivens the for- 
ests as Cornus Jiorida enlivens the forests of eastern North America, 
and Cornus Nuttallii those of our Pacific states. The three species 
have the large white or creamy white bracts under the flower-clusters 
which make the inflorescence so conspicuous, but the Asiatic tree dif- 
fers from the American trees by the union of the fruits into a globu- 
lar fleshy head, while the fruits of the American trees are not united 
together. Cornus Kousa is a small tree rarely exceeding twenty feet 
in height, and the floral bracts are narrower, more pointed and not as 
pure white as those of the American trees. It is valuable, however, 
