POTENTILLA. 



ably good size. They are borne in a rather dense long head, and their 

 petals, though more or less exceeding the sepals, are narrow and 

 grooved, and contract to a claw at the base, while at the top of their 

 narrow length they expand suddenly into a definite rounded lobe 

 so that each petal has rather the outline of an infinitesimal salt-spoon. 

 It is a plant of calcareous hot crevices all through South-eastern 

 Europe from Dalmatia to the Levant. 



P. splendens is not so good as all that. It is a whitish -flowered 

 species with flowers two to a spray, on stems of 4 or 5 inches, and in 

 themselves about half an inch across, produced in April. The leaves, 

 however, have the beauty of silver plate. It is in the kinship of 

 P. nivalis, and therefore well worth the growing. But its name is an 

 unfair handicap, and provokes a disappointment from which the plant 

 unjustly suffers. 



P. stolonifera comes from Kamchatka and has the habit of P. 

 fragarioeides, but with white flowers of twice the size. 



P. subacaulis makes a neat golden -flowered tuffet of ash-grey leaves, 

 which are ample wide-spread small trefoils, toothed all round their 

 lobes, while their stem emerges from the oddest two-horned whig-flaps 

 that contract below the horns and then widen out again, so that the 

 effect is rather as if the leaf-stem lay under the fore-quarters of an 

 earwig with unclenched pincers. 



P. subpalmata hugs the cliffs of Ararat, forming tufts of tiny leaves, 

 in two little pairs of leaflets. The stems hardly get clear of the 

 cushion, and the flowers are large for the minute scale of the mass. 



P. Thurberi is a large American species, lax and lush and in the 

 way of P. nepalensis alike in habit and in blood-coloured flowers. 



P. Tonguei is a treasure of the garden, whatever be its history. It 

 makes a dark cinqfoiled mass of tufts, near P. reptans in the leaves, 

 though they are larger and more solid ; wide clumps are formed, and 

 ramifying masses, from which, all through the later summer, spring 

 numbers of large flowers on stems of 3 or 4 inches, in a delicious shade 

 of apricot colour, deepening to a crimson suffusion at the base of each 

 petal. It runs about happily hi the sun in any light rich soil that is 

 not arid or torrid, and is a thing of the greatest charm and value. 



P. tridentato makes a neat small bush after the style of P.fruticosa, 

 but about a foot high, beset with white blossoms, and often to be 

 measured rather by the inches of one hand. 



P. unifiora recalls P. nivea, but is altogether a marked improvement 

 on that dowdy weed, having flowers of twice the size, sitting lonely 

 over a close dense mat of trefoils. It is a rare species from great 

 elevations in the Rockies, and away North to the Arctic regions. 



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