VIOLA. 



family to be found. The main blooming-time is in spring and early 

 summer, but various species, American and subalpine, continue on 

 into the later months. All Violas can bo raised from seed, but the 

 method is alow and often chancy, and by far the better propagation 

 is by division or by cuttings, which, especially in the case of the 

 more lavish-growing species, root as easily as if they were Pelar- 

 goniums in a bottle. And remember, all violets are extra variable. 



V. adunca is an American woodlander, with leafy stems and rooting 

 runners, and ample egg-shaped foliage, and big violet violets varying 

 to white, with a darker form, V. a. longipes. 



V. aetnensis stands as a form of the cruelly diverse V. calcarata. 



V. aetolica comes very close to the lovely alpestris form of V. 

 tricolor, but differs from it wholly for the better in having a soundly 

 perennial root. The sepals, too, are never narrowly lance-shaped, 

 but alwaj's short, broad triangles. V. aetolica makes a pleasant, low, 

 loose mass with abundant lavender-iilac paling pansies on upstanding 

 stems all through the summer. There is also a variety V. a. hetero- 

 sepala, with rather larger petals of golden yellow, and narrowing more 

 towards their base. These all grow fast and easily, as may be 

 imagined, as any bedding Viola. 



V. affinis lives in the moist fields and woods of North America. It 

 makes a tuft of narrowly heart-shaped leaves drawing out to a long, 

 thin point, which come up with the flowers, and are almost hairless 

 like the whole clump, scallopy-toothed, and sometimes even irregularly, 

 wavily cut at the edge. Its violets are purple with a white eye. 

 Sometimes it stands as V. venustula. 



V. alpestris is a big-flowered lavender Heartsease of annual habit, 

 and a variety of V. tricolor. For its picture, see V. aetolica. 



V. alpina is one of the rarest and most important of all the 

 mountain species, a most lovely thing, almost exactly intermediate 

 between a violet and a pansy. It is a plant hardly ever to bo seen in a 

 catalogue, yet one of quite singular amphibious beauty in the family, 

 and in cultivation perfectly easy to grow and keep in any good, light, 

 rich soil, mixed with peat and limestone chips, with such various en- 

 richments of sand, leaf-mould, loam, and old manure as the zoal of the 

 cultivator may prompt, in a ledge or slope on which the sun falls 

 freely in the later and modified half of his daily round, but which is 

 also well secured against excessivo aridness by pipes or caro. Here 

 it forms a delightful neat close tuffet of rounded, heart-shaped little 

 leaves on long stalks (all springing from tho one central crown), 

 dark, smooth and glossy green, with broad rounded scalloping along 

 their edge, and a few microscopic hairs in each scallop ; from tho 



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