PISUM. 



of about an inch and a half long. This is a plant of the South, from 

 the warm damps of Granada ; while Greece and the Balkans yield us 

 P. hirtiflora with rose-coloured blossoms and a red capsule. Nor 

 must one forget the alpine varieties of P. vulgaris itself. For this 

 greatly varies, and whereas in some ranges you get only pinched and 

 screwed little trumpets not as good as our own in form or colour, in 

 others P. vulgaris advances into the most beautiful rotund development 

 of lip, clear violet, with either one big oval patch of clear white, or 

 else a trefoil patch, contained by the purple hem of the swelling three- 

 lobed lip. These are specially often to be found in the Dolomites and 

 Southern ranges ; often the difference of a few hundred feet will mean 

 the difference between good and bad forms ; as, for instance, about 

 St. Martin Vesubie, the type is sadly inferior, both in colour and 

 form, while up towards the Madonna della Finest ra, the violets grow 

 larger, and the whiteness of the lip more evident, even though they 

 never arrive at the amplitude and clarity of the flowers that you see 

 above the Val di Daone or in the high Monzoni-Thal. Another interest- 

 ing Butterwort of those southerly parts, however, is P. longifolia, which 

 may be seen hanging in curtains and dense unhealthy-looking masses 

 of long sickly pallid flopping leaves of yellow-green on the hot shaded 

 rocks of the Roja Valley below San Dalmazzo de Tenda, a rare species, 

 but there abundant, and from stations so warm that it hardly seems 

 possible for it to be as hardy as the rest — a grief which may be miti- 

 gated if it prove to be as parsimonious with us of its blue and lilac 

 flowers as it there seems to be on its native cliffs and shining slime- 

 slides. More beautiful and profitable than this is P. Beuteri, from 

 the Jura, which has blossoms little larger than those of P. vulgaris 

 indeed, but of a soft lilac-pink. The white-blooming species. P. alpina 

 and P. lusitanica, are both found in England and Scotland, and another, 

 more yellowish in tone, P. flavescens, in the Eastern Alps ; but 

 P. alpina, the best of these, is usually but a poor little wizen thing 

 as you see it in the mountains. But here, too, localities produce the 

 most astonishing variations, and the woods of Misurina are filled with 

 a white-and-gold Pinguicula which can only be P. alpina, but in a form 

 so magnificent as to be like an albino P. grandiflora, though much 

 firmer and more refined in flower, lighting up the long mossy stretches 

 of the larch-wood with thousands of flowers like snow-pure Gloxinias, 

 with a throat of golden velvet. 



Pisum. — One of this useful family has escaped the thraldom of 



actable utilitarianism, and taken refuge high up in the shifting 



screes and moraines of Lycia, Lebanon, Eastern Caucasus, and the 



COiciao Taurus, where P. formosum rambles happily among the stones, 



76 



