®f)E l^fjotioticntiron ^ocietp ^otesi 
Gardeners’ Chronicle, July \Uh, 1879. 
Nearly twenty years ago I walked with Sir William Hooker through the 
gardens at Kew, and in the Temperate-house he gave me some pollen of the 
finest scarlet Rhododendron arboreum there, with which I made my first 
essay in hybridising. This arboreum variety was, and is, notable for size and 
colour, and also for the specially bold and martial habit of the stamens, which, 
like bayonets, seem to threaten an intruder. As there was nothing else at the 
moment available, the pollen was applied to flowers of R. ponticum. So potent 
was its influence that, although I used none of the nice precautions now deemed 
indispensable (excision of the anthers and careful isolation of the plants), the 
cross was effected, and many seedlings raised, all of which show the arboreum 
blood strongly in their foliage. Several have bloomed, and so far prove the 
prepotency of the Indian (perhaps because the pollen-parent) over the Pontic 
race. Others, and these the greater number, still refuse me a single blossom, 
but they are large and hearty plants. This, my first and very hackneyed 
experiment in Rhododendron hybridising, set me thinking about the 
geographical distribution and probable alliances cf the different species 
of the genus. The Himalayan and Nilgherry R. arboreum breeds easily and 
freely (nay, perhaps prepotently) with the Pontic, and with the American 
Catawba species, and, I believe, with R. maximum, from America also. But 
try it with some of the “ scaly ” species, and the attempt will often be an utter 
failure, although many of these “ scaly ” species are geographically its close 
neighbours. Close neighbours, however, rarely interbreed with fertility ; for, 
if they did so, they would be very apt (Primrose and Cowslip case notwith¬ 
standing) to disappear. But to return to the arboreum crosses above mentioned, 
they produce thoroughly fertile offspring. I have somewhere read that Mr. 
Standish reported that many of these reproduced themselves quite truly, and my 
own experience is nearly the same. 
This fact has often made me doubt whether the parents should be specifically 
distinguished at all. Such a question, however, is a question for the future, 
but one which we must keep open. If the Pontic and American species breed 
so freely with R. arboreum, why not, thought I, with other Indian species, at 
all events with those “ unscaly ” species, which do not seem to hail from the 
Malayan Archipelago ? Procuring, then, the pollen of R. Aucklandii and 
applying it, I watched the capsules swelling with portentous speed, outstripping 
those fertilized by the seed-bearers’ own pollen. Moreover, the capsules, when 
ripe, were full of good seed, which in oft-repeated experiments freely germinated 
and grew, leaving to me only the patient (in Rhododendron raising the almost 
pathetically patient) part of waiting for a blossom. 
Thus instructed on the subject, I soon detected some similar seedlings in the 
gardens of the Lawson Company three years ago. The foliage then told me 
their tale ; but Mr. Scott, their raiser, has since, after an absence of ten years, 
returned to vouch their ancestry, and to see many of them bloom for the first time. 
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