DESCRIPTIVE LIST OF NEW PLANTS. 
19 
subject to the little-and-often system of watering ; they are sur¬ 
rounded by a mass of mud into which the life-giving warmth of 
the atmosphere can make no progress, and the roots perish by 
reason of its absence ; but if water is given in sufficient quantity 
to pass completely through the soil, passages are opened through¬ 
out the mass, the superabundant moisture quickly passes off, and 
the spaces just occupied by the fluid are quickly filled with air, 
the porosity of the earth is preserved, and the roots continue 
healthy ; in this condition it is hardly possible the plant should 
suffer by excess, because means are preserved for its egress, while 
by the opposite method the danger is continually present. 
Hortulanus. 
DESCRIPTIVE LIST OF NEW PLANTS. 
SoLANEiE. —Bentandria Monogynia. 
Chcenestes lanceolata (Miers). The seeds of a fine flowering 
specimen of this were sent by Mr. Purdie from the mountains of 
Quindiu, marked fC a very beautiful shrub,” and so it has proved. 
The young plants grew rapidly, and were planted out against a 
wall in the Royal Gardens in the summer of 1847, where they 
blossomed, and continued to produce their umbels of rich, deep 
blue flowers, till the cold of autumn injured them. These flowers, 
in colour and general appearance, bear considerable affinity with 
Iochroma tubulosa (Habrothamnus cyaneus ), but this truly belongs 
to Mr. Miers’s new genus Chcenestes. 
It is a shrub four to five feet high, with rather large oval mem¬ 
branaceous, acute, slightly downy leaves. The flowers are pro¬ 
duced in axillary, or rather supra-axillary umbels; they are 
drooping, the corolla two inches long, rich, deep purplish-blue, 
cylindrical, glabrous, somewhat dilated at the mouth into a short, 
five-toothed, spreading limb. Stamens and.style scarcely exserted. 
—Pot. Mag. 4338. 
ScROPHULARiNEiE. —Didynamia Angiospermia. 
Browallia speciosa (Hooker). Had not the name of grandi - 
flora been preoccupied we should gladly have adopted it for the 
present new species of- Browallia, which we had the good fortune 
to receive from oar collector, Mr. Purdie, who discovered it on 
