VERONICAS. 



V. pimeleocides makes a very branching and more or less flopping 

 bush of slender sprays, usually down)-, from 3 to 18 inches in longth. 

 The loaves are small and loosely arranged and of glaucous-blue, and 

 the sessile flowers in their spikes arc violet in tone. 



V. Gilliesi is a prostrate plant (with varieties V. 67. minor, and 

 V. G. glauco-coerulea), with tiny flowers and the leaves densely tiled 

 upon the shoots. 



V. tetrasticJia forms depressed patches, often a foot across. The 

 blossoms are small and whito, hi sprays of two or four from near the 

 ends of the branchlets, on which the leaves are so close-packed and 

 plated, in four rows, clutching the stems in a close ring, that the effect 

 is of a four-sided scaly stem, each sido being even slightly concave, 

 according to the hollowed shape of the leaves. This is the first species 

 we come to, of the scale-boughcd and apparently leafless group that 

 tries to imitate Cypresses and Salicornias and Club-mosses. 



V. quadrifaria is the same thing, but slenderer and more wiry, 

 with still smaller flowers and the sides of the square stems perfectly 

 flat. 



V. tumida makes the same sort of patch, but the leaves are fat and 

 swollen in their close rows, so as to seem bulging through a mesh. 



V. tetragona has bolder ways, and stands moro or less erect, a 

 shrub of G inches at one end of the scale or 3 feet at the other. The 

 blossoms sit atop of the shoots in little huddled heads, and the thick 

 shiny leaves, fluffy-woolly at edge and base, are tiled tightly down as 

 bofore, so as to produce rigidly four-square stems, with the suggestion 

 of a Dacrydium. 



V. lycopodioeides is the same thing, but the stems are not so much 

 merely squared as sharply four-angled. The loaves, too, are broader, 

 narrowing more suddenly to a bluntish point. 



V. Hectori is a small, robust plant in the same line, not usually more 

 than a foot or so in development, with the very thick, leathery foliage 

 packed along the stems until they are perfectly smooth and cylindrical 

 instead of squared — this point being its great distinction from all these 

 last. 



V. salicornioeides is more slender in the bough and always perfectly 

 erect, with yellow-brown branches, and the usual terminal huddles of 

 small whito stars. The species that bears this name in gardens is 

 V. propinqua. 



V. Armstrongii is moro spreading and branched than either of theso 

 last, from which it otherwise only differs in having the loaves just 

 standing free from the stem at their tips, though otherwise welded into 

 the usual tight round sheath. 



436 



