To Joseph Hooker1    19 May 1869

19/5/69

 

I have to thank you, dear Dr Hooker, for your sending of a copy of your and Mr Bakers fern catalogue of your cultivated species.2 These are grateful plants mostly and generally, as you know well, of easy culture. Would it be possible for your foreman to send me a good collection of spores, to allow me to raise them?

Your wish concerning the gigantic Todea has been complied with promptly. The stem of the one secured for the Kew fernery is 4'10" high and 3' 2" in diameter and weighs many hundred pounds. I think I shall be able to get it away by the Kent next week, but I am not sure. Hence the bill of loading can be sent by next mail.

I hope your garden people will be liberal in their reciprocity. In candor I must confess, though I do so with the most friendly feelings, that according to the books of my department Kew is deeply in my debt.

The species of Epacris are not easy of culture except E. impressa, which is the only one except E. pulchella near Melbourne.

I will try to send you Xanthorrhoea Australis, the only stembearing species near Melbourne. — The two species of St. Vincent's Gulf are X. quadrangulata and X. semiplana (fragm IV, 1113); of both I made notes as early as 1847, altho' I published them only in 1864.

With best regards

Ferd. von Mueller4

 

The enormous amount of work during the planting season, when from 60000 to 70000 plants have to be selected for schools, churches & cemeteries, has left me no time to get the few N Z specimens ready, which I intended to forward by this mail.

Are any specimens of Drummonds W.A. Isoetes to spare at Kew? I have now the genus from N.Z!5

In my second set of notes on Tasmanian plants I shall have about 20 new to the island.6

 

Epacris impressa

Epacris pulchella

Isoetes

Xanthorrhoea Australis

Xanthorrhoea quadrangulata

Xanthorrhoea semiplana

 

MS annotation: And [Jy] 16/69. The date is in a darker ink, and appears to have been added afterAnd.

Notwithstanding the annotation, Hooker's reply to M's letter would appear to be J. Hooker to M, 11 July 1869; see n. 9 to that letter.

Baker (1868).
B64.05.01, pp. 111-2.
The following text is written on f. 382, but that it is a postscript to this letter is supported by the contents of Hooker's note dated 15 July 1869, added to J. Hooker to M, 11 July 1869.
Drummonds W.A. Isoetes is marked in the margin with a cross.
B71.13.05. The paper was read at the meeting of the Royal Society of Tasmania on 8 March 1870, after which a special ‘vote of thanks’ was proposed to M as a ‘savant of such world-wide fame, and whose scientific labours are so much greater than we are aware of. [who communicates] so freely with this Society, when so many other corresponding members are silent’ ( Papers and proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania for 1870 , 1871, p. 4).

Please cite as “FVM-69-05-19a,” in Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, edited by R.W. Home, Thomas A. Darragh, A.M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D.M. Sinkora, J.H. Voigt and Monika Wells accessed on 28 March 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/69-05-19a