PRIMULA. 



in any rich soil ; here on the Cliff it has formed a handsome clump 

 in a crevice (though in nature by no means addicted to such), and 

 there most gloriously hides itself with loose heads of flower in March, 

 while the rows of garden clumps are not often without blossom even 

 in the depths of winter. 



P. x globulariaefolia is one of Gusmus' many superfluous names for 

 P.xHeerii (Brugger), q.v. 



P. glomerata is a rather obscure and difficult species in the neigh- 

 bourhood of P. denticulata, from which it differs in unfurling its foliage 

 simultaneously with its flowers, while, though its leaves are almost 

 those of P. erosa (a plant very like this, and possibly a hybrid, has been 

 wrongly figured in the Bot. Mag. under the name of P. erosa), the 

 flowers are carried in a dense round head, on a stout scape, and each 

 on the very shortest pedicel consistent with being a pedicel at all. 



P. glutinosa is the despair and the delight of the enthusiast — the 

 delight, when he sees the alpine acreage of the Monzoni-Thal, or 

 Kraxentrager, or the Pasterze, veiled with a film of clear violet from 

 afar, beneath the countless clumps of its delicious blueness dotting 

 the sere brown turf of the upmost levels ; his despair when he hopes 

 to make so hearty-seeming a thing do the same at home, and sees, 

 instead, the squinny little stars on a dumpy stem that now and then 

 appear at shows, to be clucked over with gasps of awe by those who 

 know. P. glutinosa is violently calcifuge, and will only be seen at high 

 elevations in the ranges to East and South of Switzerland, just im- 

 pinging on that frontier in the Bemina range, but wandering far into 

 the South and East, abundant wherever it is found as the sands of 

 the sea, in the upper moorlands of the Hohe Tauern as on all the 

 volcanic outcrops of the Southern Dolomites. Here it covers the 

 earth in a profusion of neat massed clumps, not forming into mats, 

 but remaining concise clusters of narrow little strap-shaped toothed 

 leaves, densely sticky, from amid which shoot up several 2- or 3-inch 

 sticky dark stems, from the baggy bracts of which escapes a head of 

 most lovely flowers of pure blue-violet, with the lobes so deeply cloven 

 that it looks as if each corolla had ten segments. And not only are 

 they grateful to the eye almost beyond any other of their kind, but 

 they are no less pleasant to the nose, exhaling a delicious clean warm 

 sweetness that always suggests a translation, into terms of odour, of 

 the clean sweet white powder that decks the leaves of many species, 

 though not of P. glutinosa ; which is also so distinct in the family, as 

 being the one blue-violet species of the Alps, that it seems wonderful how 

 people can still be in a maze about it, and mix it up with the quite 

 inferior and wholly different P. integrifolia, which occupies the same 



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