PAPAVER. 



But these unfortunately are ot so sad and acid a deep magenta as to 

 make one wish the plant would confine its efforts to the production 

 of leaves. 



P. Wittmanniana is a big upstanding Paeony from Caucasus and the 

 cold shady glens of Northern Persia. It is a robustious large spread- 

 ing thing, with large and little-divided upstanding glossy leafage, 

 and big cup-shaped ample blooms to match, in a delicate tone of pale 

 and gentle yellow, of white and creamy-citron shades. Like all the 

 rest it is of the easiest culture, but just as P. Emodi sometimes so 

 snatches time by the forelock as itself to be snatched by a late frost, 

 so does P. Wittmanniana, if harried and divided, show a certain amount 

 of resentment, and after years of ever-widening prosperity may 

 suddenly mimp entirely away in a winter, and be little more seen 

 except in leaves of increasing feebleness. It is indeed a fine species, 

 not very refined, but broad and handsome in its effect ; and the 

 parent (with P. sinensis) of a most beautiful race of garden Paeonies 

 with single solid flowers of looser design in every possible lovely shade 

 of flesh and cream and sunlit apricot and half-remembered salmon 

 under a bed of melted butter. But this is not the place to tell of such, 

 nor the rock-garden fit territory to display the artificial lovelinesses 

 of P. Avant-garde and its kin. 



Papaver. — This vast family swarms with annuals and garden 

 plants of no account for us. At the same time many of the larger 

 wild perennial species have value, not only on account of their own 

 beauty, but also as blooming in late summer ; while there are some 

 monocarpics of high wor(:h, no less in the leaf than in the flower ; and 

 one alpine group of the front rank, though not always easy to decipher — 

 any more, indeed, than are many of the others, their most private 

 and vital characteristics turning out sooner or later to be founded on 

 sand. All Poppies, as is well known, will come profusely from seed, 

 and none but the alpine group ask for any special treatment. And 

 now, what is the alpine Poppy ? There are in it two species of prime 

 merit, and a meek third. 



P. alpinum, L., has the little leaves of the tuft all slit and slit and 

 slit again into thin strips, until the effect is very fine and femlike, or 

 fennel-like, and the leaves are almost hairless and of a grey tone. It 

 divides into two main types : P. Burseri (Crantz), Fedde, with white 

 flowers, j^ellow at the base, ample and beautiful ; this belongs to two 

 ranges, the one in Savoy and the Southern Valais, the other in the 

 limestone Alps of North -Eastern Austria. The second type of the plant 

 is P. Kerneri (Hayek), Fedde, being identical in all respects with the 

 last, but that the flowers are bright yellow and rather larger. This 



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