to botany and horticulture may be roughly gauged by the fact that no private garden has supplied so many subjects for plates and description in the Botanical Magazine as that of Colesborne. It gratified Elwes to learn, shortly before his death, that the number of species contributed by him for illustration in that venerable periodical amounted to one hundred.
It will be long before the presence of Elwes at the fortnightly meetings of the Council of the R.H.S. will cease to be remembered. There and in all similar gatherings he was ever conspicuous, both by reason of his massive frame and handsome, dark-bearded countenance, which ensured for him in any company
“Digito monstraii, et dicier hic est,"
and by his deep, resounding voice which sometimes tended to dominate discussion. That voice gave occasion for an amusing incident when, several years ago, the English Arboricultural Society visited the woods of Perthshire under invitation from the Scottish Arboricultural Society. Elwes, as President of the English Society, was a prominent figure in the party, commenting vigorously upon what he saw. In course of the second day’s peregrination, one Scottish forester, indicating Elwes to a com- panion, was overheard asking: “I say, is that a man or a gramophone ?”
Elwes spoke from fullness of knowledge and ripe experience. If at times his eager emphasis betrayed impatience with opinions expressed by others, none was more grateful than he for sound information from persons qualified to give it—none readier to own up when he was in the wrong. Nothing brings absent or departed friends more surely to mind than plants received as their gift. Many such gifts did I receive from Elwes, the latest of them being Cupressus formosensis, which is mentioned in Elwes and Henry’s great work on trees in 1910 with the remark, “No seeds of this remarkable species have as yet reached Europe” (Vol. V., p. 1149).
Howbeit, seed having been received from Formosa shortly after that date, Elwes sent me a seedling which is now a shapely plant ten feet high. I never pass it without kindly remembrance of the donor.
We have parted with a warm-hearted, open-handed friend, and horti¬ culture and sylviculture have lost a foremost pioneer and ready craftsman in Henry John Elwes, of whom it may justly be said:
Strenuus vixit : fortis obiit.
HERBERT MAXWELL.
