PRIMULA. 



neither more nor less than the treatment of the type, and flowers 

 so freely and long as often to exhaust itself. 



P. secundiflora. — It is not easy in simple words to convey the beauty 

 of P. secundiflora. Plant it in any rich cool loam, and it will at once 

 start growing into a perfect cabbage of long oval-pointed finely -toothed 

 leaves, bravely upstanding, bright -green and glossy, of a noble and 

 healthful appearance, continuing through the summer as the stock 

 goes on adding fresh lateral crowns to the clump (which can then be 

 taken off and grown on as fresh specimens). Early summer calls 

 the flower-stems up. These are like those of the plant's cousin, 

 P. sikkimensis, but not nearly so tall, hardly rising to a foot. They 

 hang out a one-sided shower of very wide bell-shaped flowers like 

 those of P. sikkimensis in shape, emerging from dark calyces beauti- 

 fully striped with longitudinal bands of powder. And the colour 

 of the hanging bells is. like Uncle Joseph's stores of knowledge, " a 

 thing that beggars language, Julia." In texture they are thick, and 

 the outside of the bell is of a waxen dulled flesh-colour, filmed with a 

 strange powdery bloom, and suffused with lines and nerves and 

 flushings of claret and deep rose, with blue mysteriously suggested as 

 a veil over the whole, omnipresent as the faintest of tints, like a whiff 

 of onion in a good salad ; the inside of the bell is of deep dim satin, in 

 a muffled tone of crimson-rose, with the lines and nerves intensified 

 and darkened to a glowing flush. Their beauty, against the waxen 

 bloom of the exterior, is ravishing ; their colour is such that they just 

 miss the absolutely frightful, and in the missing achieve with pre- 

 cision the absolutely beautiful. And P. secundiflora is as vigorous as 

 P. japonica, for a higher and less boggy place indeed, but no less 

 robust ; seeding profusely, and as profusely multiplying its crowns. 

 Confusion is said to rage between this and P. vittata. Prof. Balfour 

 describes the right P. secundiflora as having horizontal, while P. 

 vittata has upstanding leaves ; but his own photograph rather reverses 

 this, and shows under the name of P. secundiflora the thing described 

 above with bold and stalwart foliage ; while his plate of P. vittata 

 gives an inferior crowded head of smaller flowers, and the floppeting 

 feeble foliage that his text ascribes instead to P. secundiflora. In 

 any case the two are nearly related, and in their less characteristic 

 forms are said to be hard of discernment the one from the other. 



P. x Sendtneri is said to be a garden hybrid between P. auricula and 

 P. pedemontana, two species that could not interbreed in nature, as 

 they do not share the same ranges. It has not been described, and 

 little need either be said or thought of it— P. auricula having done its 

 best by the Erythrodoso group in its breedings vdXh. P. hirsuta. 



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