Plate 141. 
FREE-FLO WERING MONOCMTTJM. 
While flowers at all seasons are welcome guests, and are sure 
to receive their due meed of attention, there can be no doubt 
that those which greet us in early spring, whether indoors or 
in the open air, are of all others the most welcome. There are 
other flowers as pretty as the yellow Primrose or the drooping 
Snowdrop; there are other flowers as sweet as the Violet; but 
there are none more welcome, either for their appearance or 
their fragrance, than these early favourites; and so with the 
less hardy denizens of the greenhouse. The Primula is eagerly 
welcomed, not because of any special beauty, as we imagine, 
but because it and other plants are readily induced to flower 
in the dreary months of winter. When, therefore, we saw a 
plant covered with its pretty mauve-coloured flowers at the 
February show of the Royal Horticultural Society, we felt con¬ 
vinced that it was one which deserved a place in a record of 
popular flowers. 
The Free-flowering Mono elite turn* was exhibited by Messrs. 
Smith, the well-known nurserymen of Dulwich; and as the 
plant was entirely new to us, we asked them for some informa¬ 
tion on it, and have been most courteously furnished with the 
following particulars:— 
“The plant exhibited by us is a Continental hybrid, (or, as 
botanists call them, 4 garden variety,’) introduced by us last 
summer. It differs from its parent, Monochcetum sericeum , in 
its foliage being narrow and less glaucous, and its habit being 
close and dwarf, and, what is of great importance, in its pro¬ 
fuseness of flowering; it is a greenhouse variety, growing, in¬ 
deed, in pots when dry and kept warm during frosty and cold 
* Exhibited as Monochcetum sericeum multiflorum. 
