PAPAVER. 



at once be known, if by nothing else, by the long narrow pointed leaves, 

 which are not lobed or feathered at all, but merely cut into irregular 

 forward-point ing teeth, and vested thickly in silken hairs. The 

 stem-habits are much as in the last, but the buds are covered in hair, 

 instead of being perfectly bald and glaucous. (From Atlas, not his 

 Ocean.) 



P. bracteatum is even finer than P. orientale, with richer colour and 

 usually with a large black blot at the base of the satiny-crimson petal. 

 These are both, however, for the wilder garden ; and the art-nouveau 

 varieties of P. orientale, with sad shrimp-sauce- or vulcanite- or motor- 

 tyre- or mud-coloured flowers (that look like paper horrors sold at a 

 bazaar, to hold pins or adorn a lodging-house mantelpiece), are not for 

 any garden at all that rightly values itself. Other dimmer species in 

 this important group are P. lasiothrix and P. paucifoliatum. 



In the group of the monocarpic or biennial Poppies there are some 

 quite valuable wearers of notably lovely leafage, whose predilection for 

 death can be counteracted easily by always raising the seed they leave 

 behind them, so as incessantly to have a stock coming on. They have, 

 for the most part, specially handsome rosettes of long narrow leaves, 

 deeply feathered and fringed ; from which aspires a spouting shower 

 or pyramid of blossom 18 inches high or so, pretty much after the effect 

 of the statelier Meconopsids. Of such are P. tauricolum, Boiss. (the 

 form seems ungrammatical, but authoritj- has iron rules), with a 

 fountain of ample bricky-scarlet or stale blood-coloured flowers ; 

 P. persicum, stricter in the pyramid, with a green spot at the base of 

 the similarly coloured petals (there is a hybrid between these two, 

 P. x FlaJiaultii) ; P. caucasicum, glaucous-green and set with flavid 

 bristlishnesses, sending up a fountain of pale vermilion Poppies, rapidly 

 fleeting ; P. hyoscyami folium, with a very dense stiff fox-brush of 

 blossom ; P. floribundum, the finest of all, with beautiful fine-cut 

 glaucous rosette-leaves, and a noble two-foot pyramid of gorgeous 

 scarlet flowers, more tenacious of life than most ; P. fugax, P. achro- 

 chaetum, and P. Urbanianum all have the same habit and handsome 

 rosettes and pyramids, but the petals more quickly drop and are in 

 paler tones. Sadly fugacious, too, are the light -red petals of P. armeni- 

 acum. a rather dwarfer grower ; while P. libanoticum has scarcely any 

 stem at all. but has to send up the foot-stalks of its pale-purple flowers 

 naked by themselves from the rosette ; and P. polychaetum is even 

 more definitely stemless still. The most beautiful we have, however 

 (in foliage at least), is P. triniaefolium, which comes, like all these 

 others, from the hills of Asia Minor. Here the silver-glaucous leaves are 

 cut and cut again into the finest silver fringe-work, so that the effect of 



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