SENECIO. 



however is more huddled in the spray and rather less ample in the 

 bloom. In the same line is the magnificent S. japonicus (Ligularia 

 japonica or Erythrocliaete palmatifida), but rather more light in the 

 habit, with splendid leaves of refreshing shining green deeply cut into 

 five or seven fingers, and overtopped by sprays of noble blossoms of 

 intenso golden-orange. Other Ligularias, like huge Coltsfoots, with 

 aspiring yard-high spikes of yellow, are S. macrophyllus (suggesting 

 a giant Senecillis), S. sibiricus, and S. stenocepJmlus. S. Doria is the 

 same thing as S. macrophyllus, and S. suaveolens is sometimes called 

 Cacalia. It is a smooth plant of a yard or two, with narrow leaves 

 and dense spikes of dirty-white flowers faintly fragrant. S. Faberi, 

 from China, is rather a weed too, with piles of coarse pointed leafage, 

 and small mean heads of small mean flowers in small mean sprays, 

 at the top of stems more than a yard high. S. Przewalshyi has most 

 beautiful glossy foliage, deeply and sharply fingered, and gashed again 

 in long divergent pointed lobes. The flowers are quite minute, soaring 

 aloft in a narrow little mangy spike of 2 or 3 feet, drooping at the tip. 

 S. Veitchianus, however, is one of the most superb, well furnished 

 with flowers of light yellow towering above masses of enormous 

 Coltsfoot foliage ; while even this is beaten out of the field by 

 S. Wilsonianus, which unites the spiked huge habit of the last with 

 the very much larger and more brilliant flowers of S. clivorum, so that 

 you get masses and jungled acres of giant Coltsfoot from which in 

 abundance tower stout and strapping Campanili of 5 feet or so, well 

 spaced in their rich store of radiant wide suns of orange. Wholly 

 different in character from this is S. tanguticus, which is a most terrible 

 and inexorable weed, never to be got rid of when once introduced, but 

 most effective in a wild cool place, with loose and fluffy spires of tiny 

 golden blossom in clouds, suggesting a yellow Artemisia or Macleaya, 

 on stems of 3 or 4 feet, set with delicate and finely-feathered foliage, 

 dark above and light beneath. And there are still many more 

 species, but Senecios should always, if unknown, be seen in bloom 

 before being bought. And see Appendix. 



Of medium-sized Groundsels the most important are S. pulcher 

 and S. Doronicum. The former comes from Colorado, and closes the 

 year with immense flowers of flaming carmine-purple on thick stiff 

 stems of a foot or two, above very leathery fleshy foliage of dark- 

 green, narrow-oblong, and very stiffly and fatly waved and toothed 

 and gashed and scalloped along the ledge. It is a superb species, 

 though stolid and obese in habit ; and is quite hardy, though the 

 lateness of its blossoms is a fault, as they so often get wrecked. It 

 should, accordingly, have as hot a place as possible, in a soil that shall 



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