Abb. <1>
27 May
My dear Henry
I had a nice drive from Frome by Nunny Castle <2> which I recommend to your girls <3> to draw whenever they are at Frome it is only one mile a pretty road –
The garden here looks more encouraging that I had expected. Some rarities have perished, some escaped. Among the latter I am glad to find Mahonia pallida<,> Cycas revoluta, Corypha australis<,> Sabal Adansoni, Chamærops hystrix & Martiana, Tetranthera japonica, Edwardsia flexuosa & macrocarpa, Olea fragrans, Cistus formosus, &c &c – My Solanum crispums are in full blow one cannot have too many. In the Greenhouse we have [Callethrix?] a myrtaceous heathlike plant which I enclose as well as a flower & leaf of Rhod. glaucum from Sikkim the first that has flowered out of doors entirely unprotected. We have still some Narciss’s – N. gracilis a very good late one – I will save you some roots with single poeticus –
The Azaleas are splendid particularly the deep semidouble pink – & the white.
Oxalis cernua is in great force – a capricious plant that flowers at no particular season. Grevillia acanthifolia – Cytisus Weldeni – as sweet nearly as your Wistaria – magnificent Camellias nearly over – tree peonies – & some fine new hybrid rhododendrons are our chief beauties – one Scilla hyacinthoides is in flower – & Michael Angelo’s tulip the latest of all. Hemerocallis japonica flowering very well. [Egnidium?] Saundersii is a pretty type of suffrutescent crassulaceæ & the only hardy one – some geraniums have survived, tuberous & others.
Let me know when you start for the Pyrenees.
Yr aff
W F S
Notes:
1. Abbotsbury, Dorset: home of William Thomas Horner Fox Strangways.
2. A Norman castle at Nunney, Somerset, southwest of Frome.
3. Ela Theresa Talbot (1835–1893), WHFT’s 1st daughter, Rosamond Constance ‘Monie’ Talbot (1837–1906), artist & WHFT’s 2nd daughter and Matilda Caroline Gilchrist-Clark, ‘Tilly’, née Talbot (1839–1927), WHFT’s 3rd daughter.