PRIMULA. 



inspire our confidence, or the plant's own beauty delicate enough to 

 elicit our trust in a beneficent providence. 



P. marginata. — Of all our European Primulas there is none more 

 beloved than this, and none more ready to requite the affection of 

 the cultivator. For in any decent conditions of the rock-work this will 

 thrive and spread and increase. But it dislikes being planted on the 

 flat in the open border : not in the least because it does not enjoy 

 the comfortable spot and the fat soil, but because it is a child of the 

 rock and the ledge, accustomed to hang down in a cushion of leaf- 

 tufts at the end of long wooden trunks ; and in the border it misses 

 the epportunhy, yet still insists on the habit, with the result that 

 it grows out of the ground and gets to look stalky and leggy and 

 unbecoming. Set it high in the rock-work, however, and let it 

 fall down, and it will prove the beauty of a hundred years, ever 

 increasing the mass of its trunks ; and burgeoning in fresh rosettes 

 all the way down. In time it will form a sheet ; the trunks are 

 fibrous and woody, haunted by golden meal among the fibrosities 

 of their coat ; the rosettes are built of handsome leathern foliage, 

 thick and grey, picturesquely toothed, and with the ample toothing 

 outlined, especially when the leaves are young, with the same golden 

 meal in a conspicuous hem. Early spring calls up the flowers — many 

 of them in a large loose head, on a stem of 3 inches or so from .each 

 rosette — and these flowers are of a beauty unbelievable : wide-open 

 saucers of the loveliest lavender-blue, pure and clear, with infinitesimal 

 atoms of white powder hovering densely on their eye, like globules 

 in a shower on the surface of a pool. In cultivation it is not only 

 perfectly hearty and easy, and as free in blossom as P. auricula, but 

 it multiplies as readily from seed or cutting. Yet in nature this 

 loveliest blue Primula of our Alps is a rare species ; extremely abundant, 

 indeed, but only in a small limited district ranging from the Maritime 

 chain up through the Cottians, preferring the limestone, but making 

 no bones about growing happily on other formations too, and so 

 little particular about altitude that it may be found luxuriant from 

 2500 feet up to 7000 or 8000. Naturally it varies copiously, and 

 the gardener had best go and choose his forms. He is particularly 

 recommended to go to the valley of La Maddalena, above San Dal- 

 mazzo de Tenda, not only because there P. marginata exists in the most 

 rampant profusion and the most riotous and lovely degree of varia- 

 tion, but also because that valley is further occupied by a famous 

 English botanist, one Mr. Bicknell, who there has a house, and spends 

 long summers, in the course of which he asks nothing better than to 

 show the treasures of his hills to all such fellow-collectors as desire to 



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