THE 
FLORIST’S JOURNAL. 
July, 1844. 
ON THE GENUS BIGNONIA. 
WITH AN ENGRAVING OF B. PICTA. 
This fine group of plants, which includes upwards of sixty spe¬ 
cies, was named in memory of Abbe Mignon, librarian to Louis 
XIV. The larger portion are climbing plants of acknowledged 
beauty, having a most extensive geographical range ; the East 
and West Indies, Mexico, and South America, being the native 
home of many of our stove kinds, while Northern America has 
supplied us with others to adorn our conservatories and out-of- 
door walls. 
Notwithstanding this great range of country, the species soon 
become assimilated in the required treatment, and nearly any or 
all of them may be grown even together in an intermediate 
house or cool stove. Their fine pinnate, ternate, or conjugate 
foliage, and large handsome flowers in panicles of red, blue, 
yellow, or white, render them eminently beautiful objects for 
covering the pillars or roof of a plant stove or conservatory. In 
the latter the majority of the species luxuriate with a degree of 
splendour seldom witnessed in other genera; this kind of struc¬ 
ture seems peculiarly suited to them, first because of the genial, 
temperately warm atmosphere maintained, and accession of fresh 
air, and also because of the freedom which may be allowed 
to their rapidly extending shoots in the growing season. 
Extensive as is the genus Bignonia even now, it was consider¬ 
ably larger a few years since, when, by a revision which reduced 
it in a numerical view, but rendered it more definable, the new 
genus Tecoma was formed, when the well-known hardy radicans 
VOL. v. NO. VII. o 
