PRENANTHES. 



plant, making exquisitely neat small cushions of bright-green trilobed 

 foliage about 2 inches high ; and then in May (and on spasmodically 

 through the year), profusely generous with half -inch flowers of clear 

 golden yellow, delightful in themselves as in the freedom with which 

 they are ejected in showers on their fine stems in a quite dwarf cloud 

 like that of some concise and alpine form of P. verna. It thrives 

 anywhere hi the sun, like most of the rest, and is readily divided at 

 pleasure in the spring or autumn, deserving a choice foreground place, 

 alike for its small matted habit and its beautiful generosity of blossom. 



Poterium. See under Sanguisorba. 



Pratia, a small Campanulaceous family, from New Zealand and 

 the Himalaya, to be distinguished from Lobelia by producing a berry 

 and not a capsule. They should all have a sheltered place in soil 

 rather moist in summer, and very sandy and well drained. Here 

 they will run about and form close dense carpets of green studded 

 with flowers all the season through, and followed by large coloured 

 fruits in autumn. They should not always be looked on as so invari- 

 ably hardy as to lure the gardener into leaving all his Pratias in the 

 one basket of the garden through the winter ; but pieces of each should 

 be cut off and potted up securely, no less to increase the stock than to 

 guarantee it. P. arenaria is the ugliest, with coarse and thin-textured 

 toothed little pale-green leaves, and flowers of a starved spideriness 

 insufficient to make any good effect . Another comparatively unworthy 

 one is P. begoniaefolia, from the Himalaya, with roundish hairy foliage, 

 and flowers less pretty than usual, followed by purple berries. And 

 yet another worthlessness is P. montana. But when we turn to the 

 rest there is no room for anything but praise of their neat carpets 

 starred with flights of delicate lilac-and-white Lobelias. P. perjpasilla 

 is especially minute, forming dense patches, a few inches wide, of 

 microscopic foliage, close upon which appear the blossoms from the axils 

 of the shoots. P. angulata forms a mat of fleshy oval little leaves, 

 waved and coarsely-toothed, from which springs a great number of 

 long starry white flowers. P. ilicifolia has larger and more roughty- 

 toothed leaves, and Lobelias larger also and more solid, though no less 

 white. And P. macrodon breaks the record of the family, forming, 

 in the Alps of the South Island, matted patches nearly a foot across, 

 of roundish wedge-shaped fleshy foliage, roughly and coarsely toothed, 

 which is a setting for a profusion of flowers springing almost stemless 

 from the axils, and covering the carpet with conspicuously long-tubed 

 yellow stars of broad spreading rays and delicate fragrance, most 

 curiously swollen at the base of the tube. 



Prenanthes is a strange group of Composites, hardly to berecog- 



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