Plate 232. 
FUCHSIAS, LUCEEZIA BOEGIA AND 
FANTASTIC. 
There seems to be really no limit to the variations that take 
ft 
place in the very simple flower which is seen in every garden 
and which bears the most opposite extremes of climate, for we 
have seen it during the past year, luxuriating as large shrubs 
twelve and thirteen feet high, in the wild and stormy moun¬ 
tains of Mayo and Donegal, and adorning in immense quanti¬ 
ties the park and squares of Paris; and we may well ask, who 
would recognize in the curious and beautiful forms that now 
adorn our greenhouses the same plant that years ago they had 
cultivated originally with its narrow yet pretty flowers, its crim¬ 
son sepals and darker tubes l See what changes either hybri¬ 
dizing or chance have wrought in it, We have it attaining 
a size which a few years ago would have been deemed chime- 
rical; its sepals, from being pendent, have become reflexed like 
a Turk’s cap ; and in lieu of flimsiness, we have now great 
substance, the tube has increased in size and substance in pro¬ 
portion as the sepals have increased, the corolla has instead of 
being closely folded round become expanded, like a parachute 
or crinoline, or has become doubly increased in the number of 
its petals, while, as in the variety figured in our Plate, it appears 
in another and most curious form. An equal variation has 
taken place in the colouring: we have had white sepals, and 
corollas of crimson, violet, and purple; we have had, on the 
other hand, dark-crimson sepals and white corollas; and we 
have in Lucrezia Borgia a tendency to produce striped flowers 
which may vet create a revolution in the colouring* and mark- 
ing; and, as we have given evidence in our pages, the foliage 
has also added variety, and in such flowers as Meteor , Pillar of 
