CORNWALL: To-day we have been preparing soil and seed-pans for seeds of new species of rhododendron from China. The collector’s field notes, dry and brief as they are, set one marvelling afresh at the inexhaustible variety of rhododendrons, and picturing the plants from which these pinches of dust were gathered on Chinese mountains. “Five inches; leaves glabrous, minute; flowers yellow, high Alpine meadows, 15,000ft, Mount X.” That is the smallest. Then an Alpine from 12,000ft, 2ft high, with “very large rich carmine” flowers; another, dark crimson; and another with “large umbels, bright yellow.” Here’s a purple one, rather taller, and another from a fir forest, rich red purple. And so on, in all sizes and colours, up to the last packet, a tree 18ft high, with “fls, large white, very striking.” Doesn’t that make you want to come through a secret door into a garden (as yet unplanted) with “fls large white, very striking”?
Here in Cornwall the rhododendron pageant is already beginning. There will be little thyme-like creepers; and trailers that lay their crimson trumpets on mossy boulders; and cushions from granite screes covered with scarlet flowers: a whole moorland flora in purple and lilac and pink and orange and primrose; little bushes and big ones, little trees and large, in almost every colour but bright blue. The leaves vary from 2ft long to morsels no bigger than this letter O, and are coloured underneath in crimson or felted in russet or gold, or silvered. In some the leaves are as aromatic as bog-myrtle, in others the flowers have scents among the sweetest of all flower smells; and in some the calyces have their own fragrance, resembling sweet geranium. Several species will certainly stand time, and many, it now seems, will thrive in full exposure to wind.
Still the rhododendrons come pouring in from Asia. First the squashed specimens, a numbered packet of dust, and a few laconic words; then the multitude of seedlings; and lastly, some day, those “fls yellow 5 inches,” or “fls large white, very striking.”
