RANUNCULUS. 



Ranunculus. — In catalogues this race is far too fertile of un- 

 annotated names. In point of fact the family is no less fertile of 

 indistinguishable or worthless weeds, filling every wayside and 

 re up to alpine levels all the world over, with a superabundance 

 of species, many of them annuals, some of them uglies. and a vast army 

 of them not sufficiently distinct to rival the best. These are the low 

 landers : the alpine section of the family contains few that are not 

 supremely beautiful, and solitary in their especial charm. Wo are 

 yet strangers to many a white high-alpine buttercup from the Rockies, 

 and other ranges of America, that may some day threaten the secure 

 thrones of B. alpester and B. glacialis. The following list, then, can 

 be guilty only of suggestions, and sifted though the choice has been 

 with a sympathetic eye, it may very well be that among the species 

 omitted there may prove to be several deserving of a warmer fate. 



B. ab7ion7iis is a most curious species from the Alps of Central Spain, 

 is ly the foliage of B. graminifolius. though still narrower 

 and more grasslike and (like the whole growth except the flowers) on 

 a very much smaller scale, making a neat tuft of grass}- foliage in the 

 alpine herbage, with large golden blossoms on short stems of 4 or 5 

 inches, made up of some eight or ten petals instead of the fashionable- 

 five of the family, thus justifying the plant's claim to abnormality. 

 It should have open sunny places in light soil. 



B. acetosellaefolius we have long been wanting, and now our desires 

 seem in a fair way to be achieved. The plant is sadly rare, only to be 

 in the highest damp fields and slopes of the Sierra Nevada, where 

 it forms clumps of foliage really like Bumex Acetosdla — long leaves 

 lying out in a larger or smaller rosette upon the ground, in the shape 

 of a long, savage spear-head with one or more pairs of backward- 

 pointing barbs. From the neck in early summer are thrown up a pro- 

 tracted profusion of quite naked stems spraying up all round to the 

 height of 3 inches or so, but lengthening in fruit to 5 or 6 inches. 

 They never branch, and bear one large white flower, till the plant 

 looks as if a number of stems had been picked from snowy B. pyrcnaeus. 

 and stuck in round the stock of a mountain-sorrel. It should have, 

 like all the alpine field-buttercups, the open, cool, and rather moist 

 rich soil, perfectly drained and in a sunny place, that is indicated 

 for the whole group that has pyrenneus for its type. 



B. aconitifolius, with its pyramids of lucent handsome leafage, and 

 its yard -high loose showers of lovely white stars, is the joy of any 

 bog or rich waterside border, as it is of so many an alpine water- 

 meadow or open woodland recently cleared. In the Alps an eye should 

 bo kept open for forms of special amplitude and size in their blossom, 



