VIOLA. 



sometimes on cool or grassy banks make the whole expanse a shimmer- 

 ing galaxy. This really charming thing will thrive rampageously in 

 any opon place or wild, but is best, in raw climates, on an open sunny 

 bank in light, good soil, which it will then hide under the fine weeping 

 curtain of its rambling rooting sprays. 



Vincetoxicum alpinum (Cynanchum vincetoxicum). — 

 This is that rather ugly weed so often seen on hot, dry, stony screes and 

 cuttings in the Alps, growing about a foot high or more, with the fine 

 stems beset by ample oval-pointed leaves of leathern texture and 

 dark dead green (rather like a Dog's Mercury copied in morocco 

 leather) ; at the top these break in summer into axillary clusters of 

 dimmish little creamy long-throated stars. There are many species 

 and varieties, with blossoms in varying degrees of dinginess, down to 

 reddish black and blackish red. They might be grown in specially 

 barren hot places of the garden, where there is only stone ; yet it 

 would not be difficult to think of many plants more worthy of 

 admittance even as " furnishing," except perhaps in the case of 

 V. (or Asclepias) speciosum from the Levant, with largo flowers of 

 crisped purple velvet in the axils of the ample crisp-velvet foliage. 



Viola brings this alphabet to the last great dragon in its path. 

 No race is more fertile of more exquisite beauty, but no race is also 

 more fertile in dull and dowdy species. And, unfortunately in these 

 later years, the enormous multitudes of American violets have taken 

 (no less than American heiresses) to overflowing into our continent 

 undescribed, so that we have no idea, when we buy, whether the new 

 name will give us another V. Rydbergi, or merely some dingy little wood- 

 land worthlessness of no account. On the other hand, European 

 botanists have taken to subdividing some of our own species, until we 

 rush eagerly to purchase V. Eugeniae, only to discover, when the bill 

 has at last been paid, that we have secured merely a form of V. 

 calcarata, with which our garden is already paved. On all counts, 

 therefore, of complexity and confusion, no less than of multiplicity 

 and varied loveliness, the race must be dealt with in due order (with 

 a genoral ruck of undistinguished undesirables to be found by the 

 consulter herded under V. viarum and V. magellanica, in case a given 

 name on which he wants onlightenment is not to bo found occurring 

 in its alphabetical place). The cultivation of Viola either offers no 

 difficulty at all, in the case of nine species out of ten, that merely 

 require open cool loam to grow in, and thore are happy for ever ; or 

 else, in the tenth, offors so much that hints may be occasionally sug- 

 gested for these that will not be necessary for the others — especially 

 as among the problems are some of the most peerless beauties of the 



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