Dec 17 /71
Dear Von Mueller
I have often tried to identify our Australian Palms, but hitherto in vain. Will you tell me what the Palm figured in Botanical Magazine t. 4961 as Seaforthia elegans,1 & which has long been grown & known at Kew under that name, to which Brown2 assented. Cunningham sent it some 30 years ago. Wendland however according to Seemann, says that it has nothing to do with Seaforthia elegans but is a Ptychosperma
In your Enumeration of Australian Palms Fragmenta V. 49.3 you do not include the Coryphas — we have two which I have named australis & humilis.
Bull4 has just sent me a splendid Macrozamia near your description of M. Macleayi5 but frond very rigid6
Corypha australis
Corypha humilis
Macrozamia
Macrozamia Macleayi
Ptychosperma
Seaforthia elegans
W. Hooker (1827-64), vol. 93, t. 4961.
Robert Brown (1773-1858).
B65.07.03, p. 49.
Almost certainly the nurseryman William Bull (1828-1902), who was awarded a 'Botanical Certificate of Merit' for a Macrozamia exhibited at the Royal Botanic Society summer exhibition, June 1871 (Gardeners' chronicle and agricultural gazette, 17 June 1871, p. 768).
Macrozamia macleayi was described in Miquel (1868), p. 250; it has been treated as a synonym of M's Encephalartos miquelii ( B62.05.01, p. 38), which was transferred to Macrozamia in A. de Candolle (1868), pp. 535-36, but it is possible that Hooker had misremembered the author of M. macleayi.
Text ends, seemingly in mid-sentence, at bottom of page without valediction; it appears to be one half of a folded sheet from which the other half has been torn off.
MS extracted at some stage from the collections at MEL but without recording the provenance. MS embossed with crest of Royal Gardens Kew.
Please cite as “FVM-71-12-17,” 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