deep purple-brown when ripe and measuring 1 cm in diameter. The berries are eaten avidly by birds, which disperse the seeds in their droppings. The berries are unpleasantly bitter when unripe, but, once soft and deep purple-brown in colour, are edible and sweet, having a mild flavour reminiscent of toffee or caramel. Being a recent introduction to Europe, the plant lacks any traditional uses there. Distribution L. formosa includes within its wide range of distribution the areas of all the other known species of the genus. From the North-West Frontier Province and the Punjab it ranges the whole length of the Himalaya eastwards to south-eastern Yunnan, where it was collected by Henry near Mengtze, and north-eastwards to Szechuan and eastern Tibet, where Rehder's var. stenosepala appears to replace very largely the typical form. A Revision of the Genus Leycesteria - H.K. Airy-Shaw The species is native to Pakistan, India, Nepal, East and West Himalaya, Southwestern China (Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou), Tibet and Myanmar. Introduction to the U.K. Coats notes that according to John Claudius Loudon the plant was brought into cultivation in 1824 and flowered soon afterwards in Allen and Rogers's Bolingbroke Nursery in Battersea ; and that it was grown at about the same time in the gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society (known at that time as the Horticultural Society of London) from seed procured from India by John Forbes Royle. It proved something of a disappointment to those whose expectations had been raised by a rather highly-coloured plate of it in Wallich's Plantae Asiaticae Rariores (1830-2) [see image of said plate in gallery below]. Its leaves are a pale dull green...it has a rambling inelegant mode of growth, and the colour of the bracts is not at all brighter than what is represented in the accompanying plate.John LindleyThe Botanical Register (1839) The character of the plant, as developed in an artificial climate, is far from being so good as the accounts of Indian botanists had led us to anticipate. The foliage is large and handsome, and the flowers appear to be produced numerously in terminal pendent racemes; but the most showy feature is the large bracteae at the base of the flowers, which are beautifully veined and tipped with crimson. Dr. Lindley suggests that this latter character may be more prominently exhibited as the plant becomes older, and more inured to our system of cultivation.Joseph PaxtonPaxton's Magazine