JANUARY. 
11 
a pang of conscience induces us to seek out an old acquaintance, and Iry 
to do it justice at the eleventh hour. 
This was the case with myself in regard to Plumbago rosea, a short 
time since, and I had to search a dozen metropolitan and provincial 
nurseries before I could find this plant. Fifteen years ago we most of 
us went half mad about a plant which Mr. Fortune had found growing on 
the old ramparts of Shanghai. Messrs. Knight & Perry, who then had 
the nursery which Mr. Veitch now carries on with such energy in the 
King’s Road, Chelsea, possessed the stock of this wonderful Plumbago 
Larpentse.* The houses in which it was grown were kept constantly 
locked, and only a few favoured individuals were allowed a sight of the 
plant which created so much enthusiasm, which was to be a fine bedder, 
a beautiful specimen plant, and everything that is good. As soon as 
we could get hold of a little plant—for which, by-the-by, we had to 
pay in bright gold—to work we went, and every scrap of root or shoot 
had to make a cutting. And what did they prove to be ? A weed—a 
mere weed. While we had been cruelly neglecting a good and useful 
free blooming plant, with flowers of the colour of the Cerise Unique 
Geranium, which had been introduced nearly sixty years before, we 
had been driven half crazy to obtain this upstart. 
Well let us, now that we are cooled down again, go back a little, and 
do justice to an ill-used genus. Plumbago capensis holds its ground as 
a pillar or trellis plant, and well it deserves to do so, for it would be a 
difficult matter to find a rival to it for these purposes. It is almost 
half the year in flower, and we have nothing exactly like it in colour. 
P. rosea is, as I have said before, quite equal to it in general useful¬ 
ness. I have a plant now almost covered with its clear rosy flowers, 
and it has been in bloom for the last six weeks or more. P. zeylanica 
looks like capensis with white flowers. P. aphylla, I am told by a 
friend living at Calcutta, is one mass of flowers in his garden every 
season, and yet we never see it in bloom in this country. P. rhom- 
boidea has rather small blossoms of a dark purplish blue, but the habit 
of the plant is not good. Who can tell us what P. tristis is like ? And 
is P. mexicana a better white than zeylanica ? 
And now, having catechised the reader so far, let me ask a third 
question. Who will be the first to try what hybridisation will do 
among Plumbagos ? Here we have a family some members of which 
have a decidedly good habit; we have various shades of colour, from 
pale blue to dark purple, clear rosy pink, and pure white ; and further, 
the materials are, or may be, in the hands of every one. So far as we 
can tell. Plumbago may become as plastic in our hands as Tydsea, 
Passiflora, or even Begonia itself. We too often allow our continental 
brethren to carry off the palm in these things; let us see if we cannot 
take the lead ourselves for once. Few men will have the courage, in 
these days of progress, to deny that before the next three years are 
gone, we shall have a coloured figure of a hybrid Plumbago as a 
frontispiece to our periodical. 
* This plant has since been placed in another genus, and is now only occa 
sionally met with under the new title of Valoradia plumbaginoides. 
