CHAPTER XXIV
GARDENING AND HORTICULTURE
Personal Impressions and Recollections by E.A. Bowles.
Henry John Elwes stands out as one of the greatest among the numerous eminent amateur gardeners of his day. It is difficult to define the qualities which made his influence so powerful, but those that impressed me most were the width of his knowledge, his love of accuracy, and his untiring energy and generosity. I believe that his influence on the best forms of gardening has been as far reaching, and will prove as valuable and as lasting, as that of any of the able writers or makers of fine gardens among his contemporaries. As a traveller and collector he went farther afield and reaped a greater harvest than any other amateur, even including George Maw.
Gardening and collecting plants were not his chief interests in his earlier travels, which were undertaken to obtain birds and insects, and ,it was not until after lus marriage that, stimulated by Sir Joseph Hooker, he began searching for plants. He told me once of the pleasure he had derived from seeing plants in their native surroundings, and in introducing them to gardens, and ended by saying, "And to think I spent twenty of the best years of my life catching butterflies.”
Such experience, however, was not wasted, and his field work in these other branches of natural science did much to give him a wider view of collecting than that of the enrichment of gardens. His latest finds always made their way to Kew, or to someone whom he recognised as the best authority on such plants, as much for the sake of helping forward scientific knowledge as to obtain accurate names for those which he cultivated. So long ago as 1874 Joseph Hooker wrote in the Botanical Magazine when describing Galanthus Elwesii:
“I am indebted to Mr. Elwes, of Miserden House, Cirencester, a gentleman who to an ardent love of scientific horticulture unites the powers of a traveller, collector, and observing naturalist, for pointing out its distinctive character from G. plicatus . . . . Mr. Elwes collected the specimens here figured 011 the moun¬ tains near Smyrna, and cultivated them in his garden, which bids fair soon to contain perhaps the largest and best private collection of well-named bulbous plants in the kingdom.”
This accuracy of naming was always one of the valuable features of his collections of plants, and has been of great service to horticulture. It was indeed fortunate that one who distributed plants so widely was so much interested in their correct naming, especially during the period when a vogue arose for the bestowal of newly coined English names on exotic plants. Though well able to make use of the descriptions of plants in botanical books, he would have disclaimed all right to be regarded as a scientific botanist and preferred to submit specimens to others for naming. He entrusted the botanical side of his books to trained botanists -—The Genus Lilium to J, G. Baker, and that of The 'Frees of Great Britain and Ireland to Dr. Augustine Henry.
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