OF SHRUBS AND THEIR PLACING 23. 
far, but makes a spider’s web of growth, from which come 
up the heads of deep pink flowers. This is a rare, new 
species, but has no charm or preciousness to compare 
with vaccinifolium. The equally rare P. sphaerostachyon 
—though, by the way, this is frankly herbaceous, not a 
shrub at all—is, to my taste, downright ugly—an un- 
distinguished little plant eight inches high or more, 
too leafy for its dull globes of rosy blossom. Half the 
size of this, to continue my divagation, is our own rare 
native, P. viviparum, very similar, but much prettier, 
with spikes of pearl-white flowers that produce their 
young ones ready born. It is reported from our alpine 
meadows to the east of Ingleborough, and I have found 
it abundantly in upper Teesdale. In the garden it thrives 
quite happily almost anywhere, even if it prove of no 
very solid permanence. 
Returning to the greater, shrubby Knotweeds, they 
are, for the most part, only fitted for the largest, wildest 
garden, so commanding is their stature, so invasive and 
violent their development. Polygonum saghalinense is 
the most really tropical of all our cultivated plants—and 
this though it hails from so bleak and untropical a corner 
of the world as the undesirable convict island which is 
the contended bone between Russia and Japan. It rises 
to twelve feet or more, in single arching boughs, clothed 
with great leaves like magnified Hazel. It dies clean 
down in winter, and runs vehemently about underground, 
so that, in rich favourable, sheltered glades (in which 
alone it can attain its fair development) it becomes the 
most stately of weeds. Rather smaller in leaf, size, and 
habit, is P. cuspidatum, which, instead of the single 
sprays, sends up abundance of boughs from a yearly- 
thickening central crown. This, no less easy and hardy 
than saghalinense, is perhaps a safer plant to admit 
within sight of the rock-garden—though in such choice 
