Abbotsbury ^<1>
Dec 13

My dear Henry

We have a sharper & worse a more enduring frost than usual before Christmas – nevertheless nothing seems hurt. Explain how Pelargoniums &c – stand 20°F twenty ° Fahr. at night, no thaw all day, where they are, & don’t turn a leaf. Even after two or three days of it.

You sometimes want a gardener – There is a very good one at liberty, lately with our Melbury ^<2> clergyman – has been used to a botanical collection & understands plants better than most of them – besides flowers, pleasureground &c. If you want such a person I can recommend him.

Can you send me seed or root of your fine Bomareas or Alstromeria I saw at Laycock – I got a Taxonia from a nursery called manicata & it turns out mollissima

There is no prettier creeper than Convolvulus bryoniæfolius.

Emily Murray ^<3> is returned laden with curiosities or as American say notions –

Yr aff
W F S

[envelope:]
Henry F. Talbot Esq
Laycock Abbey
Chippenham
4 Atholl Crescent
Edinburgh Scotland

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Notes:

1. Abbotsbury, Dorset: home of William Thomas Horner Fox Strangways.

2. Melbury, Dorset: one of the Fox Strangways family homes; WHFT was born there.

3. Amelia ‘Emily’ Matilda Murray (1795–1884), author and Maid of Honor to Queen Victoria. Although a strong advocate in the Royal Court for the education of delinquent and abandoned children, she defended the institution of slavery in the American South after her travels there between July 1854 and October 1855. The publication of her memoir on this forced her resignation as Woman of the Bedchamber. Murray, Letters from the United States, Cuba, and Canada (London: J. W. Parker & Son, 1856).