VERONICA. 



V. r. macrocarjxi. with pink flowers in the Siena Xevada ; and the type 

 gives a diminished picture of its vet lovtlier azure cousin V. apennina. 

 V. rosea is nothing but a form of V. austriaca, with pink stars., 

 and yet ampler leaves feathered deep in broadei segments. 



V. rupestris of gardens is the variety V. T. dubia of V. Teucrium, 

 although its splendour is such that there may seem to some more 

 dubia than Teucrium about such an assignment. 



V. satureioeides is a flopping little mountain species after the habit 

 of V. saxatilis, from the mountain tope of Dalmatia. It may be known 

 botanically from V. saxatilis by the foot -stalks of the blossoms shorter 

 than their bracts, as by the five segments of the calyx ; but for the 

 gardener it is a wholly different plant, lying down in large masses, 

 with the shoots beset by bigger, leatherier, darker, rounder, more 

 obviously scalloped leafage, often almost concave ; no less than by 

 the generous and rather crowded heads of large flowers from the 

 tips of the shoots. These flowers, however, are of a dull and sullen 

 leaden blue that greatly depresses the value of what is otherwise a neat 

 and easy and useful alpine Speedwell for drooping over the edge of 

 a rock or bank. It blooms, however, much longer than the other, to 

 make up as far as it can for its lack of equal brilliance. 



F. saxafilis, when all is said and done, still stands aloft at the head 

 of our alpine Speedwells. It is a thing as delicate as it is superb, a 

 quite weakly, woody-rooted species, flopping its boughs about for 3 or 4 

 inches this way and that, and then uprising in shoots clad with pairs 

 of oval, leathery-ileshy leaves of intense and shining dark-green. But, 

 intense as their colour may be, it is as nothing to the intense azure 

 of the large and sadly short -lived stars in which the shoots conclude, 

 opening a few at a time in the loose spray. They are like rare illumi- 

 nated jewels of blue, sparkling in scattered hanclfuls on all the rocks 

 and open bare slopes of all the high Alps of Europe even into Scotland ; 

 and, for a final touch of coquetry, they have brilliant yellow anthers, 

 and a white-pale eye, rimmed with a ring of vivid crimson. It seeds 

 and grows with perfect zeal, yet never invades ; so that it is well to 

 admit it to the choice places that its choice and rare loveliness 

 deserves. 



V. scuteUata, V. scrpyllifulia. and V. cfficinalis are all natives and 

 unfitted for the garden ; only the last wuuld serve the same uses as 

 V. Alhonii, rambling neatly over the ground with pairs of pale-green 

 scalloped leaves, and sending up spires of pale blue flowers in summer, 

 on stems of 2 inches or so. (See V- cfficinalls.) 



V. senanensis is a pretty wandering species from the upland fields 

 of Japan. It has oval-pointed, toothed leaves on long petioles at the 



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