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This is the largest and finest of the flowering ashes, and attains a great size in its native home, Sir D. Brandis mentioning trees in the Chenab Valley planted near villages and temples, which reach 120 feet in height and 15 feet in girth. It is the only valuable species of ash in the Himalayas, where it grows on rich moist soils, generally on limestone. It is distributed throughout the Himalayas from the Indus to Sikkim, between 5000 and 9000 feet, but is only common locally. It is also met with in Baluchistan, Afghanistan, and in the Shan Hills of Upper Burma.

We have seen no large trees of this species in England; but it appears to do well at Kew, and probably would succeed as an ornamental tree in at any rate the warmer parts of the British Isles, (A.H.)

A shrub about 5 feet high. Branchlets grey, minutely pubescent, with a dense ring of hairs at the base of the shoot. Buds ovoid, with dark puberulous scales. Leaflets (Plate 266, Fig. 31), five to seven, 1 to 1½ inch long, thin, membranous; usually on pubescent stalklets, 4-inch long, upper pair sometimes subsessile; oval or rhomboid, broadly cuneate or rounded at the base, abruptly contracted into a long acuminate apex, crenately serrate, pale beneath; both surfaces quite glabrous. Leaf-rachis, grooved on the upper side, minutely pubescent, pubescence densest opposite the nodes.

Flowers, in terminal panicles, polygamous; petals 4, linear-obovate; calyx minute, 4-lobed. Fruit with a short slightly flattened many-nerved body, margined to about the middle by the decurrent base of the wing, which is oblong with a rounded, often emarginate apex.

This species is common on the hills near Peking and in the adjacent parts of Mongolia, and is the representative there of the European 7. Ornus. Dr. Bretschneider sent seeds in 1881 to the Arnold Arboretum, Massachusetts, where plants were raised which are perfectly hardy in New England. They are pretty shrubs with abundant clusters of white flowers. This species does not seem to be in cultivation’ in England. (A.H.)

1 This species was founded by De Candolle on specimens (one of which is at Kew) of a shrub, collected by Bunge in 1831, near Peking, and named by the latter F. floribunda in En. Pl. Chin. Bor., 61 (1832). Maximowicz, followed by Koehne and Lingelsheim, have erroneously applied De Candolle’s name to F. rhynchophylla.

2 Plants, sent to Kew by Sargent in 1903, cannot be found, and are supposed to have died. Since this article was corrected for the press, four plants from the Arnold Arboretum have arrived at Kew.