VERONICA. 



plant's improbable name. It is as easy as all the rest in any open soil 

 and site. 



V. commutata makes widely-ramifying mats after the way of 

 V. Allionii — a crisply-downy creeping thing, with the lower leaves in 

 their pairs hardly cut at all at the edge, while the upper ones are 

 feathered into fat and quite toothless regular lobes all along, with the 

 largest at the end. There are always two spikes sent up from the 

 axils towards the end of each shoot, on a longish bare stem of an inch 

 or two, ending in a close mass of erect-borne blossoms of bright azure, 

 with stamens of deep violet, huddled on their very short foot-stalks 

 into a mass. (It is a native of Southern Aragon, on the Sierra de Java- 

 lambre, taking a special form that bear3 that name.) 



V. rrassifolia is one of those tall 2 to 3-foot herbaceous Veronicas 

 with spikes of blue in late summer, for which tho border may be 

 thankful, but with which the choice rock-garden has few close dealings. 



V. cuneifolia (V. dichrus, Schott, is the Villosa variety of this) 

 makes a downy turret, and the foliage is smaller than that of 

 Teucrium Chamaedrys or the Germander. It roots as it goes, and the 

 ascending stems of 2 or 3 inches are thread-fine, emitting longish and 

 usually lonely (not paired) spires of blue flowers, with a white margin, 

 in June and July. 



V. deltigera has dainty stems that vary between 6 inches and 

 thrice that height. They are weakly uprising, leafy, hardly branch- 

 ing, and set with oblong egg-shaped pairs of leaves, more or less deeply 

 toothed. The broad-lobed blooms are about three-quarters of an inch 

 across, and their spires, of 3 to 6 inches long, are notably numerous, 

 springing from the ends of the shoots as well as from the upper axils. 

 ( West ern Himalaya . ) 



V. dentata is a little blue-flowered form from the Jura, about 

 2 inches high, but not of any special worth. 



V. dichrus is a downy variety, V. c. villosa, of V. cuneifolia, q.v. 



V. elegans is no more than a garden form of S. longifolia, with 

 ternrnal spikes of pink, and a stature of 10 inches or a foot. These 

 plants like a dampish place, and bloom through the later summer 

 months, thus atoning for the rather commonplace look of their 

 crowded upstanding spikes of brightly-coloured flowers. 



V. erinoeides = V. thessalica, q.v. 



V. ewphrasiifolia comes quite close to the downy variety of lovely 

 little V. telephiifolia, from which it differs only in not having seed- 

 podfl rather heart-shaped, but perfectly oval. It is a delightful 

 till held in store for us by the Alps of Persia. 



V. fragilie comes as a near neighbour to V. cuneifolia, but the 



42G 



