VERONICA. 



emerge red stars, either lonely, or in sprays of several. This is a 

 charming moraine treasure ; at home it shrinks into the highest crevices 

 of Makmel of Lebanon. 



V. B ma-rota {Paederota Bona-rota) acts as the " double" of Phy- 



a comosum, whose dark and glossy deep-toothed leaves are vaguely 

 imitated in general design, and absolutely in their gloss and dark 

 .-reen colouring by those of the . which at once, however, 



is seen on nearer approach to be a quite different thing in all its habit, 

 and wholly downy. It inns along freely in every crevice of the 

 S mthern limestones, hanging out from the chinks a fringe of pendent 

 shoots about 4 or 5 inches long, each ending in a longish fluffy-looking 

 cluster of longish flowers of rich clear blue. It may be grown in the 

 garden in open stony ground, but is even better hi the moraine, or with 

 a crevice at its disposal to fill. It blooms in high summer, and, like 

 the Phyteuma, is no friend to excessive torrid sunshine. 



V. caespitosa has the lovely habit of V. bombycina. It makes a 

 dense pin-cushion of greyish and rather woolly shoots, set with tiny 

 very narrow blunt leaves rolled over at the edge. The stems, among 

 the leafy shoots, are thread-fine, and all entangled, and so short that 

 the flowers hardly emerge from the mass, but sit, bright big stars of 

 pink, in their woolly calyces, close over the surface of the fit tie cushion. 

 This beauty lives on the summits of the Levant, and on Lebanon 

 a hieves a variety called V. c. hiophylla, which is wholly woolless 

 but for the inflorescence. These should both have the devotion that 

 waits on V. bombycina, which they both reward by blooming in May 

 and June, according to the fashion of the family. 



V. cana is an Indian alpine of 6 inches or a foot high, with slender 

 onhranched stems only rnosc sparingly furnished with leaves, here and 

 there in rare couples. The loose flower-sprays are about 3 inches long, 

 from the tips of the shoots as well as from the uppermost axils,, and 

 the bright blue blossom - are each about half an inch across. 



V. canescens makes a great change from the last. This is so minute 

 and so dim that you never notice that your piece of bruk.n ground or 

 your sandy bed has b ■•■n overrun by tiny pervasive shoots, set with 

 pairs of microscopic glandular oval leaves of a blunt invisible gi 

 running flat across the surface here and there ; until in Jul}' you 

 come round one day and find that whole space peppered with single 

 Iwell stars of delicate clear china blue, that have all the look 

 of having been scattered there from some overhanging spray of 

 V. Chamaedrye. But this is V. canescens, suddenly sprung to light 

 again, nt way, when you are quite sure you lost it in the 



winter, and know too well that its own place knows it no more. For 



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