Sunday, 20/8/93.
Some few days ago, dear Miss Walker, our kind friends at Brighton brought your superb drawings of fungs. The one, marked by you as a Lycoperdon is a Lysurus, and as it seems to me distinct from any of the few species, known of that genus, I have named it Lysurus Walkerae and will see it described.1 Is it a very local species there? I suppose, you have no duplicates of these drawings, so that the2 must be returned or be copied here. You can easily imagine, that I like to make the mycologic display in my two Herbarium-Halls (near the Observatory-Building) as large and instructive as possible. You deserve infinite credit for the talented zeal, with which you follow up these enquiries, which certainly in N.S.W. have the additional charm of novelty. The scarlet Polyporus is P. sanguineus (Meyer) You figured the typic form of Aseroe rubra, on which Labillardière founded the genus, the A. pentactina being only a variety.
May I advise, that you kindly number the figures of the drawings and correspondingly number the specimens also; then the danger of misreference will be averted. I will then do, all I can, to bring your researches to permanent scientific honor.
The yellowish Coral-Fungus is a species of Clavaria, allied to C. crispula, the other is also a Clavaria. There is in N.S.W. one region left, where among all sorts of plants yet new species might be found, that are the sources of the Bellinger River and the country through which they send their upper waters. If you only could make some weeks stay there in a snug farm and get the youngsters out with baskets to bring you all sorts of plants, from branchlets of trees to the smallest weeds, what a glorious time you would have of it. You would see every day plants, never beheld by you before! Such a tour should not be very costly for any one, and during midsummer the temperature must be delightful. The scenery surpasses in some places even that of the Blue Mountains, particularly through the zone of the ever-green true Beeches (Fagus Moorei).
With regardful remembrance your
Ferd. von Mueller.
Kindly think in the season of the Thysanotus with short leaves (Fringe-Lily).
Aseroe pentactina
Clavaria crispula
Fagus Moorei
Lycoperdon
Lysurus Walkerae
Polyporus sanguineus
rubra
Thysanotus
Please cite as “FVM-93-08-20,” 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 25 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/93-08-20