356 
JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 
[ Octoler 24,1889. 
paying a visit to the old village of Woodbridge in Suffolk, I saw it in 
several of the cottage windows. I have been given to understand 
it was introduced some years ago by Mr. Thompson of Ipswich.— 
C. Holder, Reading. 
- Gardening Appointment.— Mr. W. J. Holden informs us 
that he has been appointed head gardener to C. A. D. Halford, Esq. ; 
West Lodge Gardens, East Bergholt, Suffolk, post town Colchester. 
- A correspondent (“ J. L.”) desires to know which is the best 
Pink Geranium (Zonal Pelargonium) for bedding. As this is very 
much a question of taste, not uninfluenced by local circumstances, we 
leave the matter open to those flower gardeners who may be disposed to 
do so to communicate their experience;. Our correspondent mentions 
Mrs. Turner approvingly, but has been informed it has been excelled by 
another, the name of which we cannot decipher. 
- Your correspondent “A.C.,” page 327, speaks of “the solid 
stiffness of that best of travellers the Star of Waltham ” Rose. I 
once carried a half-expanded bud of this Rose In my travelling port¬ 
manteau over 1000 miles, taking it out and putting the stalk in water 
every night for four nights. On the fifth day, although then expanded, 
it would bear looking at.—W m. Paul, Waltham Cross. 
-At the meeting of the Linnean Society of New South 
Wales on August 20th Mr. J. II. Maiden read an interesting paper on 
Spinifex resin. The resin examined was a sample obtained by Mr. W* 
Froggatt near Derby, North-west Australia, last year, and presented by 
Sir William Macleay to Mr. Maiden. It is in flat cakes, about 3 inches 
in diameter, has a dirty bronze-green appearance, and a persistent dis¬ 
agreeable odour not easily described. It consists of vegetable debris 
(which may prove to belong to grass) cemented with a yellowish-brown 
Tesin, and containing about 3 per cent, of fat. Mr. Froggatt states that 
it is employed by the natives as a cement for spear-heads, &c. ; and the 
consistent testimony of the natives, as well as of the Europeans, is that 
it is obtained from the roots of Spinifex Grass (Triodia irritans, It. Brd), 
As far as the author knows the extraction of resin from a grass has never 
previously been recorded. The resin isolated bears no resemblance 
to any other Australian resin known to the author.—( Nature .) 
- In his last report to the Foreign Office on the Agricultural 
Condition of Colombia the British Consul at Bogota says that the 
Potato is the chief food of the people of the cold part of that country. 
Two principal varieties are known—namely, the Criollas, which are 
red-skinned and orange-coloured inside, and the ordinary white 
Potatoes. In 1865 the Potato disease, which was unknown till that 
year, attacked the crops, and they have decreased very much in quantity 
since then. It is worthy of remark that the greater the altitude at 
which Potatoes are planted (they are sometimes planted at a height of 
above 9000 feet on the mountains) the less tendency is there for (he 
disease to break out, and at the greatest altitudes the disease is almost, 
if not quite, unknown. With regard to the Cinchona industry the 
Consul reports that in 1884 the Government of the Republic passed a 
law for the purpose of promoting the plantation of Cinchona, India- 
rubber, and Eucalyptus trees, and the President was authorised to 
award valuable prizes to the most successful growers of Cinchona trees. 
Ihe trees to be planted were to be of four species, C. Ledgeriana> 
C. officinalis, C. lancifolia, and C. pitayensis, but, though the distribu¬ 
tion of trees was free, the law has remained a dead letter ; no new 
plantations have been made under its provisions. 
- Proposed Testimonial to Mr. W. Dean.— The follow¬ 
ing circular has been issued:—“It has been thought by many horti¬ 
culturist friends that Mr. W. Dean (late of the Mill Hill Nurseries, 
Solihull, Birmingham) having spent nearly fifty years of his life in 
useful horticultural work, and is now in declining health, that a fitting 
time has arrived for recognising the valuable services he has rendered 
to horticulture, notably amongst these being the founding of the 
National Floricultural Society, which for a time did much valuable 
work amongst florists’ and other flowers, ultimately merging into the 
Floral Committee of the Royal Horticultural Society. He was one of the 
110 Judges at the Great National Exhibition held in London in 1866, 
in addition to which he has for many years acted as judge at flower 
shows at \ ork, Dublin, Edinburgh, London, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Shrews¬ 
bury, and many other places. He was the first to introduce the Fancy 
Pansy to this country, which is now one of the most popular flowers of 
our gardens, and was at one time joint Editor of ‘ Gossip of the Garden’ 
and Editor of ‘ The Florist Guide,’ in addition to which he has been a 
frequent contributor to other gardening periodicals for more than thirty 
years. These, and other services too numerous to mention, have con¬ 
tributed so materially to the advancement of horticulture that we, the 
undersigned, think it most desirable that his friends should have an 
opportunity of showing their appreciation of such valuable services. 
Contributions will therefore be most thankfully received and acknow¬ 
ledged by any one of the undersigned : — W. B. Latham, Curator, Botanical 
Gardens, Edgbaston, Birmingham ; Walter Jones, Stephenson Chambers, 
New Street, Birmingham ; W. Spinks, The Nurseries, Solihull, Birming¬ 
ham ; R. Johnson, Springfield, Drury Lane, Solihull, Birmingham ; 
James Bubb, High Street, Solihull; and J. Hughes, Northwood Villas, 
Mitchley Lane, Harborne, Birmingham, Secretary pro tem. Contri¬ 
butions will be received up to November 1st, when the list will be 
closed, and the amount duly announced.” 
SHORTLY GALACIFOLIA. 
On page 273 of this Journal, April 4th, 1889, we find an illustration 
and description of the above-named plant, and in the October number 
of the “ Botanical Magazine ” a coloured illustration appears together 
with the following particulars by Sir J. D. Hooker :— 
One of the most interesting of North American plants is on account 
of its history, its great rarity, and of the geographical distribution of the 
genus to which it belongs, which consists of only two species, the present 
and an almost undistinguishable congener, a native in Japan. Shortia 
is thus one of the most striking proofs of that kinship of the floras of 
Eastern Temperate Asia and Eastern Noith America, to the exclusion 
of Western America, through the study of which Asa Gray has thrown 
so much light on the past history of the vegetation of the northern 
hemisphere. 
The following history of Shortia galacifolia is from the pen of 
Professor Sargent, as published in the “ Garden and Forest.” “ The 
great interest of Shortia is found in the history of this plant during the 
past century, and in the fact that of all the plants studied and described 
and classified by Asa Gray, this little herb most excited his interest. . . . 
Professor Gray was in Europe in 1839, and when examining the her¬ 
barium of the elder Michaux, preserved in the museum at Paris, he 
found an unnamed specimen of a plant, with the habit of a Pyrola and 
the foliage of Galax, of which only the leaves and a single fruit were 
preserved, and which had been collected, the label stated, in the Hautcs 
Montagnes de Carolinie. This specimen at once arrested his attention, 
and after his return two years later from his first botanical journey in 
the Carolina Mountains, where he had searched in vain for Michaux’s 
plant, he ventured to describe it, and to point out its probable affinities, 
dedicating it to Dr. C. W. Short, the author of a catalogue of the plants 
of Kentucky.” 
“ Nothing more was seen of Shortia for a long time, although no 
botanists ever visited the mountains of Carolina, and the number in 
1866 was considerable, without carrying a special commission from 
Cambridge to bring back a specimen of Micbaux’s little plant, in which 
Dr. Gray’s interest became stronger than ever, when, studying in 1858 a 
collection of Maximovicz’s Japan plants, he recognised in that botanist’s 
Schizocodon uniflorus another species of Shortia, also identical with 
the Carolina plant. These specimens, while they confirmed the validity of 
the genus, threw no further light on the Carolina plant, which botanists 
now hunted for more assiduously than ever in all the region in which 
Michaux was supposed to have travelled.” 
In fine, “ the search was given up as almost hopeless, when in May, 
1887, Shortia was found accidentally by a youth upon the banks of the 
Catawba river, near the town of Marion, in McDowell county, N. Caro¬ 
lina, at a considerable distance from the high mountains to which 
Michaux’s label assigned the plant.” 
Professor Sargent then proceeds to give an account of his own 
re-discovery of Shortia in Michaux’s original habitat, to which he was 
led for the purpose of gaining some insight into the origin of Michaux’s 
Magnolia cordata. It was during a journey of Michaux’s to get roots of 
this latter p'ant that he visited the head waters of the Keowee, and 
though weakened by sickness and hunger he proceeded to explore the 
mountains. On the day of his arrival he discovered what he called a 
nnvvel arbnste a. f. d entries rampant tur la Montaqne. Reading 
Michaux’s MSS. Journal, preserved in the Library of the American Philo¬ 
sophical Society, this note of Michaux’s interested Professor Sargent, 
and he determined to hunt for the arbuste as well as for the Magnolia, 
little suspecting what the former would prove to be. After finding the 
spot where Michaux had camped in December, 1788, and following a 
path that the old traveller must have traversed just 100 years before, he 
discovered the arbuste with denticulate leaves, and this to be no other 
than Shortia galacifolia. 
Soon after the re-discovery of Shortia by Mr. Hyam, it was widely 
distributed in America ; for, as Professor Sargent tells us, “that enter¬ 
prising young man reaped a rich harvest during a year or two by selling 
plants (and it is to be feared by exterminating them) at extravagant 
prices. The credit of flowering it for the first time in England is due 
to our indefatigable correspondent. Mr. Elwe,s who received plants of it 
from Professor Sargent, and to whom the Royal Gardens are indebted 
for that here figured, which was exhibited at the Royal Horticultural 
Society’s Exhibition in the spring of this year. Plants of it have also 
flowered at Ivew, received from Mr. F. L. Temple of Shady Hill 
Nurseries, Cambridge, U.S.A. 
