Abstract
THE appellation “new garden-plants” is rather puzzling to those who are neither botanists nor gardeners, and, indeed, it is used with somewhat different significations by both these classes of experts. Considering that not the least of the many services rendered by the Royal Gardens, Kew, is the annual publication, as an appendix to the Kew Bulletin, of a list of “new garden plants,” some explanation of what is meant by this designation may not be without interest. Let us take an illustration. The maidenhair tree, Ginkgo biloba, was in reality introduced into our gardens in 1750 or thereabouts. But let us suppose for our present purpose that it was introduced only in this year of grace 1901. Would it in that case have any right to be considered a “new plant”? If we look on it as the direct lineal descendant of a tree that grew in Greenland in Miocene times and had its ancestry still further back in the Oolitic period, we could hardly consider it as “new.” The only novelty about it would be its introduction into gardens. Similarly, the Welwitschia, now in cultivation at Kew and else-where, was, in garden parlance, a new plant. It was new to Welwitsch when he discovered it in the deserts of Mossamedes in South-West Africa, but nobody looking at the uncouth “monter” would deem it new. Rather would he think of it, as he has a clear right to do in the case of the Ginkgo, as a survival from a prehistoric past. Welwitschia has not, so far as we know, been discovered in a fossil state, but if our Antarctic “discoverers” should light upon its traces near the South Pole, no one would be greatly surprised.
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New Garden Plants: a Study in Evolution . Nature 64, 446–449 (1901). https://doi.org/10.1038/064446b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/064446b0