PRIMULA. 



mixture, or even old kitchen-garden soil, where it grows fat in rosettes 

 like cabbages, making increasing tufts of those broad dim leaves of 

 dulled-green leather, slightly recurving at the tip, so as to give 

 them a rounded effect in the matted clump, and marked with the 

 especial sign by which you may always know P. spectabilis among its 

 kin. Fur they are fitted all over their surface with minute half-trans- 

 parent dots that give the foliage the look and feel of being made of 

 green skin elastic with pores, dimmed in its sheen and offering a 

 faint, but false, suggestion of stickiness. And if only gardeners will 

 realise that this Primula, especially of its especial group, abominates 

 darkness and shade, they will get it out into the full light of daj*, 

 where it will blossom, — but not as freely as it always grows — a 

 thing so accommodating that it will even continue no less happy, 

 though it sit in pools of water all through the summer. 



P. sphaerocephala is the Chinese cousin of the Indian P. capitata, 

 for the same use and purposes and treatment. 



P. spicata has often come and gone again like the dream of beauty 

 that it is, moving even the hardened heart of experience to declare it 

 the most lovely Primula in the world. Unfortunately it is the only 

 one that seems certainly monocarpous (though some very recent 

 Catalogues are betrayed by pride of possession into a blessed doubt 

 of this) ; so that, unless the flowers can be taught to set seed, 

 their appearance is but a heart-rending flash of sunlight before 

 the night of their final departure. The leaves are oblong in outline 

 in a brave upstanding small rosette, rather leathery and shortly 

 downy. They are deeply feathered into lobes all up, and these 

 lobes are lobed and sharply toothed again, so that the outline has 

 a sumptuous lacy effect ; in the middle rises the powdery stem of 

 3 or 4 inches, bearing perhaps half a dozen flowers. And the name 

 of the plant is misleading though true ; for these are indeed arranged 

 in a spike, and yet they do not look it, the flower-clad portion of 

 the scape just gently elongating with a very short interval between 

 blossom and blossom, so that the effect is rather that of a loose long 

 head of those amazing wide-open bell-shaped saucers, a little jagged 

 in the lobes, and of the serenest pure china-blue, veiled with a faint 

 haze of silver meal. It should have the worshipful treatment of 

 P. JReidii, and be sat up with night and day when in flower, 

 that it may be prevailed on, with food and flattery, to set fertile 



P. x spinuJosa, a false name of Gusmus for P. x intermedia, Porten- 

 Bchl., qv. 



P. x Steinii is the central p >int of the hybrid between P. minima 



186 



