Peter Collinson sends Linnaeus a specimen of a plant collected in his garden. Two eminent botanists are of different opinions as to its proper name.
Johann Albert Schlosser thinks it is a Patagonula, but not the same as the one published in Johann Jacob Dillenius, Hortus Elthamensis.
Peder Ascanius calls it a species of Lithospermum.
Collinson leaves it to Linnaeus to judge what its name shall be and to what class it belongs.
Collinson asks Linnaeus to do this as soon as possible and to give them his verdict.
On a loose scrap of paper, enclosed in the letter, Collinson continues:
The Patagonula flowered in Collinson’s garden both this and the previous years.
Collinson has had two specimens of Saracena this year. He keeps them in an artificial bog and moss, and their roots do not go down into the soil.
The Acacia with red flowers, as Mark Catesby has it, flowered in Collinson’s garden this year for the first time. It comes from South Carolina, and is a very beautiful tree. Georg Dionysius Ehret will paint it and publish the picture together with pictures of many other new and rare plants that have flowered in English gardens [Ehret meant presumably his water-coloured illustrations for Christopher Jacob Trew’s, Plantae selectae], among them Collinson’s own.