PRIMULA. 



whether on lime or granite, not coming farther West than the Brenner 

 district, and always, where found at all (and it is very local), being 

 found in the most princely abundance, filling all the hills with a 

 rolling carpet of its tiny glossy rosettes, which may always be known 

 by the abrupt wedge-shape of their tiny lucent leaves, cut square 

 across the end, and there breaking into several sharp teeth. On the 

 granites of the Brenner and on the upper limestones of the Forcella 

 Lungieres it veils the alpine green with its colour-sheets of solitary 

 stemless flowers, between whose crowds you could hardly poke a pin. 

 You may there come up, perhaps, against the light, towards some 

 small boss of grass, and it will all seem a dropped shawl of shimmering 

 silk, occupied wholly by the yard-wide mats of the Primula, in one 

 unanimous blaze of beauty, and a dozen diverse shades of loveliness. 

 For no two plants will be of precisely the same note ; but they 

 range from palest to deepest rosy -lilac, till the rolling hill, as you 

 come up towards it, blends into one quivering carpet of colour, 

 palpitating and iridescent in a thousand tones. And if one quests 

 farther, there are white forms, and blue forms, and forms with fringed 

 petals, and forms with larger flowers, or adumbrations of a stalk to 

 them, and many another diversion in the way of size or colour. But 

 in cultivation P. minima has a bad name. In loose mixtures of peat, 

 leaf -mould, loam, lime, and plenty of sand and chips, it will grow and 

 spread, but it is not always prompt and free of bloom ; nor, when 

 the flowers do appear, do they always escape the charge of raggedness 

 in outline and uncleanness in washy aniline tone, that on the hills 

 they triumph over by force of sheer abundance and the clarifying 

 air of the mountains. It should have, in any case, abundant water 

 while growing, and the full light of day ; it should also not be planted 

 in dreary isolation, but wadded closely up with Gentiana verna, 

 Douglasia, Dianthus alpinus, Androsace villosa, A. chamaejasme, 

 Viola calcarata, V. alpina, and all the other small fry which are co- 

 tissues of the carpets that sheet the Schlern or the Schneeberg. 



P. minutissima lives on the highest passes of the Himalaya, and 

 may, if got, be made happy in the choicest underground-watered 

 moraine or gentian-bed. It is a tiny, most lovely thing, clustering 

 in clumps of foliage like that of a rather broad-leaved toothed 

 Androsace carnea, occupying the crests of the ripples on the great 

 passes, while the snow is lying in their trough ; and the Primula, matted 

 upon the glistering darkness of the stones, makes masses and patches 

 of pure colour. The whole tuft is barely an inch high, sometimes 

 emitting runners, and often sitting in wide congregations of clumps ; 

 the flowers are enormous for the plant, perfectly stemless, wide-faced 



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