October 10. 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
31 
may be made a very striking feature in a collection, and rve 
J bave a hundred worse that have been put out as first-class 
varieties. The Great Western was said to have been raised 
j by Mr. Patterson, gardener to the Baroness Wenman, at 
i Thame Bark. 
The winding-up Dahlia Shoiv at Mr. Braggs, of 
Slough, gave us nothing in the shape of novelties, nor 
did the appearance of the new flowers alter the general 
aspect of the hundred-and-thirty varieties which made 
their appearance in the lists to come out in spring. 
The meeting at the dinner table was, as usual, rather full, 
and a box of blooms arrived, long after the cloth was cleared, 
from Mr. Drummond of Bath ; among these there was one 
called Boh, sufficiently good to attract attention, and we 
should like to see it again. E. Y. 
NEW PLANTS. 
THEIR PORTRAITS, BIOGRAPHIES, AND CULTURE. 
! Large-flowered Escallonia (Escallonia macrantha ).— 
I Gardeners Magazine of Botany, iii. 209.—Escallouiads 
! (of which more than two dozen species have been 
described in this genus) form, with Oaks and Dry mis, 
a zone of vegetation from the Equator southwards 
through the Andes of Peru and Chili, at an elevation 
of from 6,G00 to 14,760 feet, consequently they are more 
hardy with us than Cape or Australian plants in general. 
Besides, some stragglers from the main body are met 
with through Patagonia, onwards to its land's end, 
Terra del Euego, and the adjacent island of Chiloe, 
where this, perhaps the most beautiful plant of the 
genus, was found by the recent explorer of many regions, 
Mr. William Lobb, by whom it was transmitted to the 
| Messrs. Veitch, of Exeter. These enterprising collectors 
j brought it forward two years ago at the London exhi¬ 
bitions, where its great merits as a half-hardy plant were 
soon recognised; add to this the great facility of in¬ 
creasing it by cuttings, and it is not to be wondered at 
that so fine a plant has already found its way into every 
garden of note in the three kingdoms and on the con¬ 
tinent. Next spring small plants of it will very likely 
be offered for sale at a shilling a-piece, so that every 
cottage gardener may have one to plant on the front 
side of his house, to be trained up against the wall like 
a currant-tree. 
The whole genus are plants closely allied to the Currant- 
worts, their dry fruit being the principal character by which 
some of them can be distinguished from allied species of 
the Currant, although some authors, and Decandolle among 
them, have supposed them to have relationship with Heath- 
worts and Saxifrages, owing to their many-seedcd fruit. As 
early as 1824, Brown demonstrated the necessity of placing 
the Escalloniads next to the Curranlworts, in Franklin's 
Voyage, page 766, when he first instituted the Natural 
Order Escalloniacere , or Escalloniads, as they are now more 
euphoniously called. Six years later, Decandolle, in his 
great Prodromus, still adheres to the opinion of their being 
a distant section of the Saxifrages; but this view of their 
affinity has not been much countenanced in this country. 
Ruiz and Pavon, the authors of the Flora Peruviana, could 
not well escape a whole region of vegetation which lay 
across their tract, as did that of the Escalloniads ; and we 
find them describing most of the species. They called the 
genus Stereoxylon, but one of their compatriots named 
Mutis, who took up his residence in New Grenada, was on 
the mountains before them, with one of his pupils, whose 
name was EscaUon, and after him Mutis named this genus 
Escallonia, so that the name published in the Flora Peru¬ 
viana falls in as a synonyme to it. Mutis sent specimens 
and his generic descriptions of Escallonia, to the younger 
Linnaeus, who published the name ere the manuscripts of 
the Flora Peruviana were ready for the press. Escallonia 
macrantha is from a lower latitude than that of the region 
which the great body of the family inhabit, being a native 
of tire Island of Chiloe; we may, therefore, expect it to 
prove more hardy than those we possess from either side 
of the Andes chain, which renders it still more valuable for 
general cultivation. We have seen the large specimen of 
it which was exhibited this season by Mr. Yeitch, and also 
a fine and faithfully-coloured figure of it which appeared 
lately in the Gardener's Magazine of Botany. A friend of 
of ours has made a fine specimen, a yard high, from a 
little plant this season, which was not more than four inches 
high at the beginning of last February. His method was 
to allow it a space at the end of a hot, damp stove, where it 
grew so fast as to require a fresh pot every six weeks. The 
compost he used, we believe, was little else than the old 
proportions of loam, peat, and sand. About the middle of 
August this plant was taken from the stove, and placed in a 
cold pit with the glass on, where, he informs us, he intends 
to rest it until the natural heat of the season will stimulate 
the plant into fresh growth in the spring, when it is to be 
planted against a low wall, such as that recommended by 
Mr. Beaton. We may also state, in passing, that the green J 
ends of all the shoots on this plant were cut off and made 
into cuttings, when the plant was removed from the hot¬ 
house, the cuttings were put under a bell-glass in a hotbed, 
and before the end of September, when we saw them, the 
pot was getting filled with roots. We did not ask the j 
compost used for these cuttings, but we saw the top was all j 
of white sand. 
The genus Escallonia belongs to the first order of 
the fifth class in the Linmean system, Pentandria Mono- 
gynia, and E. macrantha is an evergreen shrub, about 
five feet high ; branches, round and hairy; leaves, pointed 
oval, tooth-edged, and with depressed net-work mark¬ 
ings on the upper surface, which is dark green and ! 
smooth, but beneath, pale, and dotted witli resinous points ; , 
flowers , crimson, in clusters at the ends of the young j 
branches, each pip having a deciduous small bract; corolla 
five petaled and tubular; stamens, the length of the tube. 
B. J. j 
Escallonia macrantha flowers on the current year’s growth, 
like the Fuchsia; and the same treatment in every respect j 
