Rome
2 June 1831
My dear Henry
I think you would enjoy Rome just now – there are not many English here, & the weather is just pleasant. I went to see poor Mauri, <1> who has had a paralytic attack which prevents his being an active botanist, but seems in good spirits & is busy having nothing else to do, preparing a new edition of the Flora Romana complete, which I dare say will be a good work. Among the new plants will be Linum serrulatum & Arum tenuifolium. Pray try some Arums from seed. I met with him Don Carlo Bonaparte <2> who is a zealous naturalist, I am to see his Villa Paolina a Porta Pia someday. Borghese <3> has made great additions to his villa – I saw there a good deal of flesh coloured Lychnis dioica – a proof, in a country where there is no pink var. one that it is not a hybrid. In England we find all these. I want to find an oxlip in some country where there are primroses but no cowslips – or vice versâ – In the villa Panfili they have planted an avenue of alternate Cedars & Yew, which will be handsome some day. The row of Melias on the Pincio is beautiful. I found Medicago circinnata which Mauri says is a new genus – Astrag. hamosus – the least pretty of its tribe – but no Ophrys hiulca – Yesterday I went to the Monte Sagro a curious wild looking place – & found several plants new to me – But my greatest trouvaille <4> was on the road from Viterbo – in the hedges of the first part of the Campagna – large red roses like garden roses & a beautiful Cytisus quite new to me – the prettiest, after the Laburnum & purpureus I ever saw. The Campagna is beautifully green & there will be a seconda falcitura <5> this year – Do you know Anthemis valentina & Pyrethrum Myconi? I went to the Fonte d’Egeria & found Vicia tricolor which I hope at last to get seed of – Scabiosa integrifolia, Vicia pseudocracca, Lathyrus angustifolius, Silene trinervia, a fine Verbascum, &c Mauri told me to look for Cyperus badius, <6> which I am not cyperaceous enough to know It is a horrid weed, & they have a proverb, saying, La vigna dove cresce la radichiella, Date la in dote con la sorella <7>– tell this to Horatia, <8> I know she is fond of le gentillezze della lingua Italiana. <9> As you have plenty of walls try the Italian way of planting the rampant roses, mutiflora, Banksiæ, sempervirens musk &c on the north side, & tender creepers, passion flower jessamine, Bignonia &c on the south; the northern will hang over & flower on the south side & mix beautifully with the others. I saw in a villa the common white convolvulus sepium trained up with china roses & looking very handsome. Tenore <10> has published a Sylloge <11> in which he endeavours to correct his former too great multiplication of Species by uniting them (not reuniting them) according to new combinations à tort et à travers <12> changing names & plants – in short what was confusion before, is worse confounded now. They find fault with his Latin too, as unworthy of the Naturalists model, Pliny.
H. F. Talbot Esqe
31 Sackville Street
Notes:
1. Ernesto Mauri (1791–1836), Italian botanist.
2. Charles Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte (1803–1857), ornithologist and zoologist.
3. At the beginning of the 19th century, Prince Camillo Borghese (1775–1832) set up his family’s art collection at the Villa Borghese, now a museum, built in the early 17th century.
4. Find.
5. Second cutting [of hay].
6. Brown sedge.
7. The vineyard where the weed grows, Give it away as your sister’s dowry.
8. Henrietta Horatia Maria Gaisford, née Feilding (1810–1851), WHFT’s half-sister.
9. The charms of the Italian language.
10. Michel Tenore (1780–1861), Italian botanist & traveller
11. Michele Tenore (1780–1861), Sylloge plantarum vascularium floræ Neapolitanæ … (Naples: Fibreni, 1831).
12. Here, there and everywhere.