I take back to London with me today, amongst other things, some Lachenalia aurea. All Lachenalias are worth growing. They are little Cape bulbs, which have to be treated like the Freezias, watered as long as the leaves are green, and then dried. They all force well, and L. aurea flowers earlier than the other Lachenalias, and is very pretty and effective. This variety has the great merit of being a true yellow by candle-light.

Walking along the streets to-day, I stopped to look at a really beautiful large cross, entirely composed of moss dotted all over with the lovely little early single Snowdrops. Although I have the strongest objection to the modern use of flowers for the dead, natural and lovable as was the original idea, I had to admire this specimen. Could a more beautiful winter memorial for a young girl be seen, or one which better carries out in these cold days the idea of the French poet ?

Elle etait de ce monde ou les plus belles choses

Ont le pire destin"; Et rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses

L'espace d'un matin.

The French have carried the abuse of this fashion of funeral wreaths and crosses to an even greater extent than we have here. I shall never forget once in Paris going up to the Pere-Lachaise cemetery on a fine morning to visit the grave of a young and much-lamented woman. The wreaths were so numerous that they had to be taken up in a cart the day before. The night had been wet, and the surroundings of the grave were a mass of unapproachable corruption and decay.

Last April, when I was at Kew, the gardener there shook into my pocket-handkerchief a little seed of Cineraria cruenta, the type-plant from the Cape, and the origin of all the Cinerarias of our greenhouses. It has a very different and much taller growth than the cultivated ones, and I am most anxious to see if it will do in water, which the ordinary ones do not. It varies in shade from pale to deep lilac, rather like a Michaelmas Daisy. Getting seeds from abroad of type-plants is very interesting gardening. Pelargoniums of all kinds are weeds at the Cape, and, in order to be able to resist the long droughts, they have, in South Africa, tuberous roots like Dahlias. This is well seen in Andrews' 'Botanist's Repository,' which I shall mention among the March books. Pelargoniums, under cultivation and with much watering, no longer require these tubers, and they disappear. Seed was sent to me from some of the wild plants at the Cape, and even the first year, as the plants grew, there were the little tubers, quite marked and distinct.