PRIMULA. 



P. sinuata waits our urgent call in the mountain woods of Szechuan. 

 It is a beautiful small species, with tufts of oblong toothed leaves, 

 homy-hemmed and drawing to a long foot-stalk. The stem is 

 shorter than they, carrying from one to three flowers that emerge from 

 a tubular bright-green calyx with overlapping lobes. The blossoms 

 are noble bells of pink with a very long tube about an inch in length. 



P. Smithiani is like a paler, poorer P. Biilleyana of similar needs. 



P. soldanelloeides, like all members of the marvellous group to which 

 it gives its name, is a species august in its rarity no less than in its 

 beauty. It is a tiny frail jewel of the high passes in Sikkim, with 

 delicate tufts of soft little oblong-obovate foliage, deeply feathered 

 into many lobes, and sending up a fairy-fine stemling of an inch and a 

 half or so, whose bell-shaped calyx is the base of a swelling pendent 

 bell of waxen snow-pure white, preposterously large for the plant, 

 and turning outwards with what seem like ten blunt lobes, suggesting 

 the outline of a Soldanella, though without the full fringiness. For 

 its duo rites of worship, see under P. Reidii, which is a sort of gross 

 and glorious incarnation of this unearthly elfin beauty. 



P. sonchifolia got as far as germination once, but would come no 

 further — a reluctance the more to be deplored when w r e learn that its 

 charm so kindled the heart of its finder with rapture that he first 

 named it P. gratissima, until it took its proper name after the 

 strange sow-thistlish design of its outspread leaves, which are hairless, 

 greyish-green, papery, and rough with raised dots. They are about 

 6 or 8 inches long, and very deeply and doubly gashed into blunt 

 lobes, toothed sharply all round, and, when the summer is old, 

 almost seeming to point backwards after the barbed style of Sow- 

 thistle and Dandelion. These, however, are not what cause the 

 heart to leap in gladness on the high summits of Tsang-chan in 

 the dawn of the year. For there, in the first moments of the 

 melting snow, among the open brushwood of the mountain glens, 

 no leaves at all are seen, but only rich wide heads of rich wide 

 lavender-blue flowers, delicately fringed all round their lobes, 

 sitting close over the dank earth in ample raying domes of blossom, 

 emerging from the crown beforo all else, on fat stems so short that 

 it seems as if each bloom sprang directly from the stock on a stem of 

 its own, as in P. Winteri — whose beauty of fringed lavender blossom is 

 here recalled, though the five lobes of P. sonchifolia are more starry 

 and distinct than the fuller orbs of P. Winteri. 



P. Sordid, also from Szechuan, is a little f-p^cies remarkable for the 

 long, definite, and delicate stems of its blunt and rounded leaves, 

 oblong and scalloped and powderless, though roughish with a short 



184 



