PRIMULA. 



out of it, and an advance guard has come already into cultivation 

 under the name of P. Winteri. which is now to keep and take its rank 

 as a true species under the shadow of P. petiolaris. of which it was the 

 powdered form once known as P. p. pulveruhnta. Other former 

 ies now promoted to specific rank arc P. p. Stracheyi (winch has 

 become P. Drummondiana), and P. p. sulphured (which now stands 

 under the name of P. sulphur ea), differing from P. Winteri in being 

 smaller in all parts, with bilobed and unfringed flower-segments, and 

 possessing I investiture of yellow meal from which it draws its 



name. Varieties yet remaining under P. petiolaris are P. p. nana, a 

 lovely compact neat thing, with the ample lobes of lavender 

 :ely and wavily scalloped at the edge, while the toothed foliage 

 is alinust sessile in the outspread clump, and clad in a scanty coat of 

 meal or eke quite naked. There is also P. p. scapigera, sending up 

 an umbel of flowers, unlike the rest, frilled at the base with a whorl of 

 quite minute but perfect leaves instead of bracts. And there are 

 many other marked forms, especially under P. p. nana, which also 

 kads on to P. Hookeri and P. Stirtoniana. The whole of this group is 

 going to be most precious ; the\- seem all hardy, they seem all peren- 

 nial ; the}' are all of easy culture in good rich soil, well -drained, 

 among limestone rocks, and abundantly flushed with water at the 

 growing time. Their profusion of flower is almost absurd, and has 

 brought on P. Winteri the undeserved suspicion of being biennial, 

 nobody believing that a plant which so blooms and blooms away can 

 possibly live to bloom another day. All of a colony will blossom at 

 once, too, and often twice in the season, and even more often. It is 

 ironical that the name petiolaris should have been given to the one 

 species in the group which has the least conspicuously-stalked leaves 

 in most of its forms — whether the flowers be white or rose-pink or 

 bright purple, or of the soft rich lavender that so holds us spellbound 

 in front of P. Winteri. 



P. Petitmengini is a form of P. obconica, q.v. 



P. x Peyritachii (Stein), a discarded name for P. x pulescens, Jacq. 



P. pinnatifida makes lovely little clumps of soft bristly -haired oval 

 foliage, deeply feathered all along into gashed lobes ; and then from 

 each crown in summer it sends up a stem of 6 inches or more bearing 

 a close head or very short spire of pendulous fragrant bells widening 

 out and suggesting the blossoms of a bright lavender-coloured Daphne. 

 I is perhaps the daintiest and most charming of the Grape-hyacinth 

 group, and lives beside the melting snows of the Li-kiang Glacier, high- 

 up on limit of vegetation, and in stony peaty pasture, taking 

 yet neater and more brilliant forms in the company of P. bella and 



168 



