Lacock
July 5th 1866
My dear Sir
Thanks for the Trouble you have taken about my plant. <1> I cannot read the name of the professor at Kew to whom you sent the specimens,<2> but I see it is not Hooker <3> – If you will let me know the name I will communicate with him next week when I go to Town for a few days & can easily go over to Kew.
As to the plant, I myself had thought of Barbacenia but that is an exclusively Brazilian genus –
It cannot be a Hypoxis, which differs widely in habit and which some Botanists are disposed to consider as closely related to Ornithogalum luteum of Linnćus, <4> or Gagea lutea of the English Flora. <5>
But the habit agrees with Barbacenia many fine kinds of which are figured in Martius’s Flora Brasiliensis. <6>
You recollect my sending you a yellow papilionaceous plant last Summer, which you considered to be a Dumasia. <7> It ripen’d seed with me, & I have raised several young plants, one or more of which I shall be happy to present to you –
Yours Truly
H. F. Talbot
Professor Balfour
[added on blank side of sheet, in Balfour’s hand:]
1866
Talbot
Notes:
1. Vellozia. See Doc. No: 09099.
2. This is apparently a reference to a Balfour note or letter which has not been traced.
3. Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911), who had succeeded his father as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1865.
4. Carolus Linnćus [Carl von Linné] (1707–78), Swedish botanist, founder of the binomial system of nomenclature and thus a seminal figure in botany. The Linnean Society, London was named in his honour. He published the Genera plantarum in 1738.
5. James Sowerby (1757–1822), James Edward Smith (1759–1828), and others, English botany . . . (London: 1790–1866).
6. Dr Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794–1868), German botanist, Flora brasiliensis . . . (Stuttgart; Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1829–33).
7. See Doc. No: 09040.