To Joseph Hooker¹    20 May 1872

Melbourne

bot Garden

20/5/72

I think I have at last satisfactor[e]ly arranged about getting an other Todea, dear Dr Hooker. The season has been unusually wet; but if I can get it away next month it will come still before winter to you, though it will have to encounter the frosts of Cape Horn. Should I fail to get such a monster, as you desire,² then I will return the £15 - -, which are now fully at my disposal, as you generously and disinterestedly gave me alone for the sending of the other large specimen credit, which is really not just to yourself.³

I admire much the record of this plant in your Magazine,⁴ but there is a slight alteration needed in one part of the record. These large Todeas do not emanate always laterally from the banks of torrents or rivulets, but more frequently stand quite upright in the shallow water-courses, the rivulets washing around them and the Todeas standing in the water like so many little islands. I assure you the game of getting at one of these giants in the deep ravines and recesses in this colony at least is highly exciting. Shooting excursions or deer staking⁵ is nothing compared to it. Chamois hunting is a fairer comparison.

By way of trial I am going to send you a tall stem of Cycas angulata (C. gracilis Miq.) If it perishes on the way, it will still be acceptable for the Museum.

Poor Mrs Calvert, formerly Miss Atkinson, whose name so often occurs in the flor Australiana, died this month.⁶ She leaves an infant child. Her husband is Jam. Calvert Esq J.P. one of the Companions of Leichhardt in his first great Expedition, a truly excellent man.

The Gardener, to whom you gave an introduction, has called; but in this country, any man, eve[r] so inferior, cannot be moved to make place for a better one. Hence I cannot give employment for your protegee however much I wish. I try to get him a place elsewhere.⁷ My miseries in the Department arose largely from the continued grossest secret misrepresentations of a few of the lowest underlings of gardeners, one particularly vulgar and low, and whom I cannot remove, though he holds only the place of a common working gardener.⁸ Yet withall I am held responsible for the welworking of the department, but not supported in my authority!

The appendix to the Acclim. Soc. Report on utilitarian plant⁹ will only be printed in full by next mail, so my lecture on the objects of bot Gardens¹⁰

With best regards yours

Ferd von Mueller

My reply to the stupid cruel and largely truthless report of the three [persons], who sat anno dei 1871 to judge on her Majestys bot Garden of Victoria, has not yet been printed;¹¹ but when issued you surely shall have a copy. So you may see, what it means when proverbially it has become said "what may happen to a man in Victoria"

Cycas angulata

Cycas gracilis

Todea