31 
of rusty brown hair; the flowers are creamy white and the fruit is dark 
blue covered with a glaucous bloom. This Viburnum has been growing 
in sheltered positions in the Arboretum for several years, and a plant 
on the upper side of Hickory Path near Centre Street has not before 
been more thickly covered with flov/er-buds. The Japanese Viburnum 
Sieboldii under favorable conditions can grow to a height of twenty-five 
feet although it is often a shrub in habit. It has long, bright green 
oblong, coarsely toothed leaves, and flowers in flat clusters from two and 
a half to four inches in diameter and handsome oblong fruit pink at 
first when fully grown becoming black and lustrous at maturity and 
then soon falling from the branches. The leaves when crushed emit a 
most disagreeable odor. For the decoration of American gardens this 
Japanese plant is inferior to either of the three American arborescent 
species. 
The Mountain Halesia or Silver Beil Tree. {Halesia monticola). 
Until the beginning of the present century the botanists who visited 
the high Appalachian Mountains took it for granted that the Halesia 
which grows at altitudes above 2500 feet was the same as the bushy 
tree of the foothills and upland valleys of the Piedmont region and 
southward. This idea having been generally accepted, and as the low¬ 
land plant had for more than a century been common in gardens, no 
attempt was made to cultivate the mountain tree, and the gardens of 
the United States and Europe have been deprived of one of the hand¬ 
somest trees of the North American forests. The tree of the high 
mountains is not rarely eighty or ninety feet high with a straight trunk 
sometimes from three to three and a half feet in diameter, often 
free of branches for fifty or sixty feet from the ground, and covered 
with bark separating into great platelike scales like those of a scaly- 
barked Hickory or a Swamp Cottonwood. The flowers are somewhat 
larger and the fruit is twice as large as the flowers and fruit of the 
lowland tree. The habit of the plant and the size of the flowers and 
fruits are reproduced in the seedlings which begin to grow as trees 
with a single stem. The seedlings show no variation in habit, and the 
young trees grow with a single straight stem with short branches 
which form a narrow symmetrical pyramidal head. The young trees 
often begin to flower and to produce fertile seeds before they are ten 
feet tall. This mountain tree has proved to be perfectly hardy in the 
Arboretum where it is growing rapidly and where it has now flowered 
and produced fruit since 1913. It is a tree which seems destined to 
play an important part in the decoration of American parks and which 
may prove useful for street and roadside planting. 
Neillia sinensis is now in great beauty on the upper side of Hickory 
Path growing in the shade of a Japanese Walnut-tree. It is a shrub 
from western China introduced by Wilson and the best representative of 
a genus of the Rose Family which has been grown in the Arboretum. 
It is a large wide-spreading shrub with slender stems and dark green, 
long-pointed coarsely serrate leaves with prominent veins deeply im¬ 
pressed on the upper side of the leaf. The flowers are cylindric, clear 
pale pink in color and nearly half an inch long; they are borne in slen¬ 
der, nodding racemes from three to four inches in length, terminal 
