VERONICA. 



annuals, there seems no valid plea against furnishing all the rocks 

 with Perilla, Alternanthera, and Pelargoniums, as if it were carpet- 

 bedding at the Crystal Palace. 



Verfoeslna Purpusii is a Mexican alpino, only to be trusted in 

 very light and chipful soil, in very warm and sheltered corners. It is 

 hardly worth all this trouble ; it makes loose tufts of oval basal leaves, 

 and then sends up in summer long naked stems of a foot or so in 

 rich abundance, gawkily standing out this way and that, and each 

 carrying a single flower, liko an inferior Arnica montana, with a rather 

 conical eye, and not quite counterbalancing the ebullient mass of 

 leafage at the base, so different from Arnica's neat flat rosettes. 



Vernonia. — These arc gigantic perennial Eupatoriums or False 

 Hemps from America, with stems of 6 feet or more, bearing tasselled 

 sprays at the top, of intense and vivid violet. They will grow in any 

 wild cool place, and wax mighty and thick into tall waving jungles, 

 but their flowers are usually behind the times in England, except in 

 specially warm and sheltered places, and get cut off in November 

 before their prime. There are many species : those best known are 

 V. noveboracensis, and the even more wealthy -blooming V. arhansana. 



Veronica. — This vast and on the whole undistinguished, raco 

 has nevertheless provided us with a large number of most brilliant 

 treasures for the rock-garden, ahke among those that stand up and 

 among those that lie down ; and it may roughly be said that in clean 

 open soil and open sunny exposure there is not a single Veronica 

 that is not easy to grow, and often, indeed, rampageous and inde- 

 structible. Having done this, however, and amply furnished our 

 edgings and rockwork from the Old and the New World, Veronica has 

 overflowed into Australasia, and there developed (besides rock- jewels) 

 a new, most perplexing family of wholly diiferent aspect — repellent 

 leathern bushes with hard dead-looking foliage often of a metallic 

 cast-iron look, or else with no apparent loaves at all, but scaly 

 stiff branches and tentacles liko gigantic club-mosses on some panto- 

 mime scene of the L ;wer Regions. These are in a state of perilous 

 confusion at present ; but, as many are valued by some for " furnish- 

 ing " in tho rock-garden, where they are most of thorn tolerably hardy, 

 this list proposes first to deal with the normal and respectable species, 

 herbaceous in look if not in deed, that abound in the Old World and 

 the New ; and then, more cursorily, to run through the list of the 

 more desirable Now Zealand shrubs and treasures, clinging, however, 

 to the hand of Cheeseman without question, as tho gardener's best cluo 

 in tho labyrinth of these almost indecent bushes — plants that are no 

 plants, but lifeless imitations of living things, forgod by Hephaestus 



421 



