SEXECILLIS CARPATHICA. 



S. soboUferum follows the same example of keeping its young 



involved in balls, a fashion followed by all prudent mothers ; and is, 



i ot, a smaller version of the next, with erect yellow-pale 



bells. 



8. hirtum, however, has no feeling for balls, and its young rosettes 

 are not wrapped up in them, but go forth into tho world in full ex- 

 pansion. Tho rosettes are neat, unfolding so amply that at last 

 they give almost tho effect of a tropical Nymphaea with hairy green 

 petals, so long and pointed and independent are the fleshy omerald 

 leaves. The flowers are of a clearer yellow than in the last, not 

 exhausted and made anaemic by the strain of balls upon their mother- 

 stem, which is about three times the size and height of S. areiiarium 

 and S. soboliferum — as indeed is the whole plant, which forms broad 

 flat masses in the rocks and walls of the Eastern Alps. 



Senecillis carpathica (Senecio glaucus) is almost a 

 Senecio, and extremely handsome with its long stiffly-upstanding oval- 

 rounded leaves of clear glaucous-blue, about 18 inches high. The 

 flowers are large and yellow, in a rather close shower at the top of a 

 yard-high stem ; they make a contrast with the leaves, but are not 

 themselves of any startling beauty. Senecillis thrives readily in deep 

 rich loam in a shady aspect, may be multiplied by seed or division, 

 and blooms in the later summer. 



Senecio is perhaps tho largest single family in the world, and 

 perhaps the most uniformly hideous and weedy, with some of the 

 most noble exceptions. It is as much temperate as tropical, as 

 happy on the Equator as on the Alps. Before, however, we deal 

 with the alpine group there remains a section of herbaceous plants that 

 cannot here be omitted, as they are such noble adornments of the 

 bog and waterside. They are all of tropical enormousness of habit, 

 some with huge showering heads of bloom, others with fluffy spires, 

 others with tall spikes of big flowers or tall close tails of little ones. 

 They are all quite easy and vigorous, verging on the voluminousness 

 of weeds ; they all like cool deep and rich soil ; they nearly all bloom 

 golden in late summer, and they are all to be freely multiplied whether 

 by division or seed. I name only the best, as at present known, most 

 of them being comparatively new arrivals from China. S. aconiti- 

 folius (Syneilesis) has flowers of dim pink in loose spires on branching 

 stems, above very deeply finger-cut foliage of ample outline. Much 

 nobler is 8. clivorum, one of the finest in the group, with huge leaves 

 like those of a super-Coltsfoot on long stems, whose masses are sur- 

 mounted by great branching showers of wry large flowers of the 

 richest gold ; this has a dwarfer variety, 8. c. subcrenatus, that 



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