1875.] 
THE NATIONAL CARNATION AND FICOTEE SOCIETY. 
265 
BEGONIA EMPEROR. 
WITH AN ILLUSTRATION. 
E have already figured one or two of the novel hybridised forms of 
tuberous Begonias which have sprung from B. Veitchii , Pecircei , and 
Clarkii crossed with B. boliviensis , and which promise to be so extremely 
useful for decorative purposes, in the greenhouse and conservatory cer¬ 
tainly, if not also in the summer flower-garden. We now introduce another of 
these cross-bred forms, raised by Messrs. Veitch and Sons, of Chelsea, between 
B. Clarkii and B. Chelsoni , and which when exhibited in June last, before the 
Floral Committee, received the award of a First-class Certificate. 
The plant is vigorous in habit, producing stoutish erect fleshy branching 
purplish-red stems, and ovate acuminate, unequal-sided, distantly-lobed leaves, 
the edges of which are acutely serrate. The flowers are very large, in axillary 
clusters of three, one being male and two female. The male flower is 
sensibly the larger, its two sepals being 2^ in. long and 1^- in. broad, ovate-obtuse, 
and its two petals somewhat smaller and oblong. The female flowers have five 
petaloid' organs surmounting the winged ovaries. All the flowers are of a bright 
orange-red. This is one of the finest of these tuberous-rooted Begonias we have 
seen, and is most highly to be commended as a decorative plant. With high 
cultivation, it would make a charming specimen.—T. Moore. 
THE NATIONAL CARNATION AND PICOTEE SOCIETY: 
EXHIBITION AT MANCHESTER, AUGUST loTH. 
CCEPT my thanks, Mr. Editor, for the ready permission given me to make 
some comment on this Exhibition, held in the large glass conservatory of 
the Manchester Botanical and Horticultural Society on the above date. 
As I looked around upon the display, enhanced as it was by a most artistic 
setting at the hands of the respected Curator of the gardens, my memory reverted 
to a former Exhibition held in the same building just eighteen years before ; and 
remembering that of that exhibition, I had felt bound to remark upon the in¬ 
feriority of the Picotees as compared with the Carnations, a fact very surprising 
to me, as in “ my experience, the Picotee required much less skill and attention to 
develop it in perfection than the Carnation,” I noted with great satisfaction the 
advance made by my Northern friends in this direction, and I am bound to say 
not only were they fairly abreast of the flowers I had in my own garden, and the 
fine flowers I had seen at Slough, but in the purple edges—both light and heavy, 
they had certain varieties in a degree of perfection far beyond what I had seen 
in the South, and leaving, indeed, little either to be attained or desired. If I say 
that I marked the blood of some of my own bantlings of a long time ago in several 
of these most beautiful varieties, and that, if spared, I shall watch with a very 
special interest their development in my own garden in the coming season, more 
particularly as it was generally held, I believe, and frequently asserted, that 
ORD SERIES.—VIII. 
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