Appendix N.
REPORT ON THE BOTANICAL AND FORESTRY DEPARTMENT FOR THE YEAR 1915.
GENERAL REMARKS.
The weather was generally favourable throughout the year but at the end of October and beginning of November rain and wind did much damage to winter vegetables and flowering annuals.
Many hundreds of the young trees planted alongside the roads in the New Territories were also blown down by these gales but, as they were given prompt attention, they appear to have suffered very little permanent injury.
GARDENS & GROUNDS.
Botanic Gardens.-Winter-flowering annuals in the first quarter of the year were not as good as usual owing to the previous exceptionally wet autumn.
The gardens were gay throughout the year with either flowering trees or shrubs.
A bed of Iris tectorum, the roof Iris of Japan, was particularly good in the Old Garden.
Rhododendron Championæ, which generally flowers in April, flowered in January.
A young plant of Clerodendron splendens, a crimson-flowered creeper, was received from the Royal Gardens, Kew, in 1913.
At the beginning of 1915 it was planted in the New Garden where it has done well.
Its flowers were produced freely in December, and it is undoubtedly a great acquisition.
Poinsettias were planted in the "blue grass" on both sides of the Albany entrance steps and their bright colouring was very attractive at the end of the year.
A plant of Phyllostachys nidularia, which was recently detected on the hills in Hongkong, was planted near the Bamboo group.
Several specimens of Cassia nodosa and Cassia javanica were planted in the gardens and they have made good progress. Both are fine flowering trees.