PHLOMIS. 



shrublet, with arching sprays about a foot high or more (at the best), 

 clothed in long, evergreen foliage dark and oblong, rolled at the 

 edges of the leaves, and glistering in a sombre healthiness of green ; 

 from these sprays depend solid waxy flowers in late summer like those 

 of a rather smaller Lapageria (of which this plant is indeed a small 

 cousin, so close in relationship that the two have interbred and produced 

 a hybrid, Philageria). This species comes from Chili, and is quite 

 hardy, but likes a very cool and shady place distinctly on the damp 

 side in summer, and rather high upon the rock-work, that its pendent 

 bells may best strike the eye amid the arches of the shoots ; its soil 

 should be a heavy, rich and clammy mixture of sand, leaf-mould, and 

 peat, with lumps of sandstone dug in for the roots to grip. Thus 

 planted, in a shaded ledge, PhUesia will send out fat goose-quill 

 runners pink as pigs, and soon possess the whole space, rilling it with 

 banks of lovely overhanging sprays of deep glossy green all the year, 

 and kindling its darkness with noble roseate waxy trumpets through 

 the later summer. Once established. PhUesia may be propagated by 

 pieces pulled off and restarted, but is otherwise best left alone. It 

 also appears, in limestone cracks, sometimes to die vehemently and 

 thoroughly at a week's notice, and it will therefore do no harm to act 

 on the hypothesis of post hoc, propter hoc, and conclude it a lime- 

 hater, departing out of life as soon as its runners have impinged on rock 

 containing the accursed thing. 



Phlomis. — The Jerusalem Sages are, for the most part, too 

 large for admission to the rock-garden, to say nothing of the fact 

 that they have a goodly share of that coarseness which is the lot of 

 all the larger Labiates ; and nothing, even, of the further fact that 

 they are all rank Southerners, with leaves of wool, and very often 

 hearts of wool to match. They make, however, stately subjects for 

 high, hot ledges of the great rock-garden, in light and limy soil (or 

 indeed any soil that is safe from stagnation in whiter), and many can 

 be found in catalogues. The choicest, however, for lower places, are 

 P. rigida, which is only a foot or a foot and a half high, with heads of 

 pink flowers up the stem. This, like all the rest, blooms in late 

 summer, and comes from the dry mountain valleys of Armenia. Yet 

 choicer and rarer is P. crinita from fat and stony ground high in the 

 alps of Atlas, Valencia, and Granada. This makes great woody masses, 

 and the obese, egg-shaped leaves are snowy-white with reverend wool in 

 their young days, and reverse the process of nature, by growing less 

 ash-white as they advance into the season ; the stems too are snowy 

 with wool, and the dim tawny flowers, borne in whorls of nine or ten 

 iii dense clusters up the stalk, emerge from calyces and bracts that are 



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