Naples
June 17
Dear Henry
I am glad to see by your letter you are thinking seriously of a botanic garden – It is too late to send you seeds for this year but I have sent Tenore <1> a list of bulbs which he is to make an intelligent labourer take up this week before all the leaves are down The weather this spring at Florence was so very unfavorable I made but a small collection there – the tulips &c flowered fine but not early & the immediate wet put them out of sight & rotted many before it was time to take them up – O. <2> narbonense I must order from Florence as it is very rare here. Tenore has found another at Mte Gargano quite new – between narb. & pyrenaicum. & a beautiful dwarf Campanula – I hope you make rockwork at Lacock. No garden will do without it. The walks about the strada nuova are quite spoilt with paltry villas &c being built all along – & the ravines enclosed. The cultivation of that fine great purple mesembry. has wonderfully succeeded in all the walls & rocks – it is a taste I have only seen here & at Nice. I believe it is Mes– rubro-cinctum – falsely calling itself M. dolabriforme in most gardens.
I send you no seeds as I know not whether this may not follow you to Switzerland – you say nothing of your projects – Tenore was much interested with yr acct of Ionian plants & took notes of them – He does not know Euph. Gussoni but says Gussone <3> found one he calls E. achenocarpa – with solid berries which do not dehisce at all. He conjectures also your A. Sibthorpii to be A. ciliatum Grilli joined by Decandolle <4> with A. subhirsutum – but different I have seeds of it but will send you a bulb – & if you have a specimen to spare I will beg it for Tenore. His garden has many new sorts (sp or var) of Dianthus which please me. I shall towards the autumn get from him a complete set of Neapolitan seeds for you & will write to Raddi & Viviani <5> to the same effect you had better do so to Bertoloni <6> – In the country I passed from Rome not a single plant was in seed – here they are all over nearly – I saw immense Muscari comosum near Florence this year I almost doubt yours being different.
Let me recommend you at the outset [of your?] <7> gardening career to begin making a vast deposit of leaves, which as you have trees will be easy – & every after 3 years begin to take some for earth, always supplying the deficiency. It makes the best basis of soil for everything You should also have a store of bog earth & a store of pure sand that will not cake I am afraid the Cyclamen roots will dry up at this season – I am quite sorry Emma <8> had not an opportunity of shewing Orchis provincialis & Serapias cordigera as it seems they are not among yours. Tenore has just recd the Linnean transactions <9> in exchange for his work which pleases him mightily – as also the works I brought him. I found his D. longicaulis a very nice species at Miseno the other day – I think it has been taken for Caryophyllus –. He says there is a delphinium nanum in Apulia is it D. græcum
Gussone has published the 1st vol of his Flora Siculæ prod. <10> on the plan of Fl. Græca <11> – would you like to have a copy? 1 vol. 8vo – Tulipa Sylvestris often has 2 flowers. Raddi has seen 4. What do you say to ‘T. biflora’. I dont agree with Reboul. <12> Is the cactus of Crevola the same as the great things you see here?
H. F. Talbot Esqr
31 Sackville Street
Notes:
1. Michel Tenore (1780–1861), Italian botanist & traveller.
2. Ornithogalum.
3. Giovanni Gussone (1787–1866), botanist.
4. Augustin Pyramus (or Pyrame) de Candolle (1778-1841), Swiss botanist.
5. Joseph (Giuseppe) Raddi (1770–1829), Italian botanist, and Domenico Viviani (1772–1840), botanist.
6. Prof Antoine Bertoloni (1793–1868), Italian botanist.
7. Text torn away under seal.
8. Emma Thomasina Llewelyn, née Talbot (1806–1881), photographer; WHFT’s Welsh cousin.
9. Transactions of the Linnean Society, London.
10. Giovanni Gussone, Floræ Siculæ prodromus, sive, Plantarum in Sicilia ulteriori … (Naples: 1827–1828).
11. Probably John Sibthorp et al., Flora Græca, London, between 1806 and 1840. Gussone also published a Flora of the Ionian Islands and western Greece in 1826.
12. Eugenio de Reboul, botanist.