To Joseph Hooker   25 April 1888

25/4/88.¹

This day, dear Sir Joseph, a trading horticulturist here sent me a flowering Dendrobium Sumneri, which gave me an opportunity of verifying the original description from a fresh living plant, and at the same time to settle, that your suspicion of D. Phalaenopsis being identical with D. Sumneri, was well founded. Indeed the two cannot even be separated as varieties. What you caused to be depicted in the bot. Magazine 6817² is merely somewhat larger, though perhaps through cultured luxuriancy.

Will you kindly let Prof Dyer know this, so that the first name for this plant may be given to it also in the Kew Orchid House. Since I left the Garden I have very rarely opportunities to extend my researches to cultivated ornamental plants.

I had a kind letter from you last week,³ concerning the labor involved in rearranging the genera of many great orders, an achievement, I know to appreciate. Indeed if you never had done anything else than writing your share of the "genera",⁴ it would immortalize you! Remarkably enough, intervals of about 40 years were between all the great "genera plantarum", which Tournefort, Linnaeus, Jussieu, Endlicher and finally you and Bentham wrote. It is now nearly 30 years since you took up the genera. I am sure we all wish, you could crown your labours with a new edition of that great opus, embracing all the discoveries of the three last decades. — You allude kindly to the Royal Society having had brought under its cognizance, what I may have accomplished here; all I can say is, that I honestly did what I could in a new distant land, and as I have neither property nor family, I should regard any recognition from the great Royal Society now so late in my life all the more.⁵ this is the first centennial Jubilee year for Australia too!⁶ Lady Hooker sent me kindly an impression of your admirable speech given on the occasion, when you received the Societys highest bestowal.⁷

Perhaps you and Lady Hooker will at the end of the summer be down in some part of the coast, and her Ladyship may help you to look for Cheno[le]a Hirsuta. As I found it on the Schleswig coast, nearly half a century ago, directly opposite the British, [often] in a glabrous form among Suaeda, you are sure to discover it also there, though the W. coast may be still more promising for finding it.

Ever regardfully your

Ferd. von Mueller.⁸

Mr Fitzgerald illustrated D. Smillieae & Sarcochilus Hartmanni⁹ also under new names, though well known in cultivation.¹⁰

When the "Key"¹¹ shall be through the press, I shall come to the naming of Papuan plants again, and then make up a set for Kew.

Towards autumn the sometimes spiral twist of the Chenolea is most marked; the axillary minute tufts of hairs lead also to distinguishing it from Suaeda maritima, & of course the fruit altho' minute

Chenolea Hirsuta

Dendrobium Phalaenopsis

Dendrobium Smillieae

Dendrobium Sumneri

Sarcochilus Hartmanni

Suaeda maritima