[Acacia Melanoxylon, the celebrated Black-Wood of Australia, used in the manufacture of railway coaches, interior finish, etc. These seeds were ordered from and selected by Baron Von Mueller, of Melbourne Botanical Gardens, from the healthiest and most symmetrical trees which could be found.
…
I have been raising the [Eucalyptus] trees by the 100,000 and have tried in all ways all seeds. The most complete success I have had, has been from seed selected for me by Baron von Mueller, at Melbourne, on direct order.]
Acacia Melanoxylon
Eucalyptus
Letter not found. The text given here is from 'The Eucalyptus', New Orleans bulletin, 28 November 1875, p. 3. The article begins
A distinguished firm of seedsmen and florists of San Francisco recently received from Udolpho Wolfe & Co, of New York, an order for seeds of sundry varieties of the Eucalyptus or Blue Gum Tree, other wise known as the Tasmanian Fever Tree. When filling the order, the senior member of the firm wrote an interesting letter, noting facts relative to the Eucalyptus, which may be interesting to many of the readers of the Bulletin.'
The article contains a list of Eucalyptus species together with 'Casuerina (sic) suberosa' and the Acacia melanoxylon comment extracted here.
The San Francisco firm that ordered seed from M and supplied Wolfe & Co has not been identified. Their letter to M is tentatively dated to no later than 1872, on the basis of the quoted comment in the article that 'I have [Eucalyptus] trees less than three years from the seed, now twenty-five to thirty feet high and twenty to thirty inches in circumference', and the assumption that these were grown from early seeds obtained from M.
Please cite as “FVM-72-00-00b,” 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