188 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
The Cimicifugas never attract me very much; their 
glossy, elder-like foliage is very handsome, and effective 
too are the long bottle-brush spikes of white that they 
send up to the height of five feet or more—some in early 
summer, and others at intervals on into late autumn. 
Davurica, I fancy, is the handsomest, and all thrive with 
the most unexacting ease in any cool soil. But they have 
something a little coarse and rank about them, to my 
taste—perhaps a hinted warning of the poison that lurks 
in all their being. It is fortunate that poison-plants 
seldom if ever fail to offer some such indication of their 
nature to the sensitive observer. Who would take Atropa, 
Hyoscyamus, or fatal Hellebore, for ordinary benign, 
innocent creatures; or fail to feel an intuition of evil 
about Monkshood, Foxglove, and Daphne mezereon ? 
And the Cimicifugas, like their rare native cousin, Actaca 
spicata, are too unmistakably ominous in appearance to 
have the full attraction of their beauty. 
The Loosestrife, on the other hand, is plain but respect- 
able, to set against the bad prettiness of the Baneberries. 
I call Lythrum salicaria plain, perhaps cruelly and with- 
out justice, but its profuse spikes of flowers have a 
lacerating crudity of magenta that destroys everything 
else within a radius of a hundred yards, kills all the joy of 
one’s eye, and quite disqualifies the Loosestrife, handsome 
and blameless as it is, for any place in the careful and 
selected garden. I had it once, by accident, next to a 
flaming orange mass of Montbretia Pottsii. Shrieks fail 
utterly to paint the horror of that jangle, ‘ which fiddle- 
strings is weakness to expredge my nerves’ when I recall 
it. The other, true Loosestrifes—Lysimachia, not Lythrum 
—are useful, tall coarse things for the distance, for remote 
places with which we do not more closely concern our- 
selves. 
Spigelia marilandica is an American from southerly 
