Page 75
trouble (see the letters sent by Russian botanist Carl Johann Maximowicz from Japan to Gartenflora, published in this magazine in 1863). The biggest problem facing cherries during this period was that it was not fashionable to plant them. Landscape design was for the large estate. The designers of the midnineteenth-century gardens, often great dendrologists, dreamed of evergreen trees and of the geometric flower bed. Ivy and laurel were not considered boring plants, but gave a touch of life to the winter garden, whereas the rest of nature was still bare and dead. Flowers might be a designer's concern, but flowering trees formed only part of mixed coppices that made up the design of the scenic landscape styles. In the best case, cherries were a kind of undergrowth. It was unthinkable to plant a solitary flowering cherry. Moreover the complaint that flowering cherries did not produce edible fruits was heard everywhere. Westerners living in Japan had to import their cherry fruits from Australia, and the Germans referred to flowering cherries as Falschkirschen (false cherries). Even the scientific names of the early flowering cherries discriminated against them. In Latin they were called "pseudo-cerasus," a supposed but not a real cherry. Complaints on the discordantly barbaric Japanese names of garden forms accompany the rare article that appears on this poorly understood plant from a poorly understood, strange country far away. Following the Industrial Revolution and the growing class of well-to-do citizens, gardening became a more common pastime in the last quarter of the century. Horticulture was a respectable science with international ambitions by that time, crossing borders and connecting continents. There was a lively production of magazines and journals and, helped by some singular imports, flowering cherries entered French and Belgian magazines to delight the reader in the 1870s. The Revue Horticole, for example, introduced three cherries by Carrière: Prunus sieboldii (synonym 'Takasago') in 1866 (37: 371), Cerasus lannesiana in 1872 (p. 198; 1873, p. 351, with illustration), and an article and lithograph of Cerasus serratifolia Lindley (synonym Prunus serrulata 'Alboplena') and its form rosea (synonym 'Ichi-hara-tora-no-o'; sold as Cerasus sieboldii rubra ca. 1869) in 1877 (pp. 389390). Flore des Serres presented Cerasus caproniana flore roseo pleno (synonym 'Fukurokuju'?) by Louis Van Houtte in 1875 (21: 141, Taf. 2238). This same plant, "of unknown origin but available at Van Houtte's," was shown with less purplish flowers that same year in Revue