OF ODD TREASURES 143 
flowered, has blossoms of a rich, hot, salmon-scarlet, and, 
combined with the moonlit blue of G. F. Wilson and the 
snowy chastity of Nelsonit, makes an unsurpassable tri- 
colour of the most subtle yet blazing beauty—the more 
so that the other rosy Phloxes have a taint of magenta. 
The large Natural Order of the Borages provides me 
with a good number of easy things and a good number 
of difficult ones too. To deal with the worst of these 
first—there is only one Lithospermum, so far as I can 
discover, that is really and truly a limestone plant. 
Alas that I have never had the chance of proving Litho- 
spermum erythrorhizon, whose big round flowers make the 
copses below Nikko into the reflection of a cloudless sky 
at dawn! Lithospermum graminifolium grows here very 
affably, but too many of the others pine and languish, 
even if I give them peat-soil and all the luxuries that 
heart can desire. Among the languishers is azure pro- 
stratum—rich in colour as any Gentian—that is such a 
Meibuts’ of sandy, Surrey gardens; as well as petraeum 
and the dazzling, half-hardy rosmarinifolium from sun- 
baked sea-cliffs by Amalfi—so that of their beauty, 
therefore, I dare not trust myself to tell, lest, like the 
bereaved Achilles, I should speak the unhusbanded truth, 
and melt into wild lamentations. But graminifolium is 
a very dear and gracious plant, with many prostrate 
branches, each terminating in a grassy rosette that sends 
up in June a nodding head of lovely pale blue, tubular 
flowers—in fact, though this plant has not the awful 
brilliancy of the celestial Lithospermums, I console myself 
by believing that it has even more tenderness of charm. 
And the way it grows is a pure joy. 
With zntermediwm, a hybrid, I believe, of graminifolium, 
I have had success ; the lovely Gastoni does well here: 
and purpureo-coeruleum, the rare Welsh native, is a fine 
ramping thing, which has, at last, I don’t know why, died 
