VIOLA. 



golden day in Juno, with his feet planted right and left on a Gentian 

 a Pansy, and, looking out across that illimitable ocean of 

 loveliness with a peevish eye, said, "I don't call this much of a 

 display ! " So back he went to study carpet-bedding in Balham. 

 V. calcarata is abundant and universal in the high turf of all the 

 Alps, until on the Eastern limestone its place is taken by the wholly 

 different V. alpina. The Spurred Pansy runs and ramps through 

 the herbage far and wide, with its frail and thready shoots, sending 

 up here and there its tufts of little, oval, scalloped, smooth leaves, and 

 the great flowers on their stems of 2 or 3 inches. So current is the 

 habit of its growth, indeed, that it becomes most difficult to collect, 

 never staying long enough in one place for us to be able to get well- 

 rooted morsels off some choice variety ; and making it even hard work 

 to get good pieces of the plant at all, unless you look out for some open 

 shaly bank or crumbling slope of earth near the path-side, where the 

 absence of rivals may have coaxed the Pansy into a concise and clumpy 

 mocd. In the course of its vast range, indeed, this evasive tendency 

 of the Viola occasions much woe to its admirers, for few beauties vary 

 more widely into forms and colours more delectable. There are 

 comfortable, fat-faced forms, and thin, lean, angular ones ; some have 

 the lower lip dropped and triangular and long as an embittered 

 Puritan's ; others are flattened till they are as jolly as the jovialities 

 reflected in a broadening mirror ; some are large and stately and ample, 

 while others are little and thin and delicate and starry. In colour, 

 too, they vary no less distractingly, for, apart from the general 

 wide range of tones (in which at any moment you may come upon 

 something special, either in clarity or intensity), you may also happen 

 on strange beautiful thunder-and-lightnmg blends of citron and 

 bronze and violet, or sometimes, though very rarely indeed, on ono 

 with pansies of a pure but muffled sad flesh -pink. None of these, 

 when got, are inferior to the typo in ease of cultivation ; V. calcarata 

 is a marvel of vigour in any rich, open soil in which it can have a 

 sufficiency of water. In some gardens it seems shy of flower — a fact 

 that may account for the preposterous rarity in cultivation of this, 

 one of the most brilliant of all alpines and one of the heartiest in 

 growth ; but in others it forms sheeted masses of its green as lavishly 

 besprent with its royal glowing pansies as if it were the commonest of 

 bedding Violas. These admirable plants it imitates, too, not only 

 in the freedom of its growth, but also in the freedom with which it 

 will strike from cuttings ; so that in a year or two, you could have 

 whole edgings of some chosen and cherished variety. But these 

 varieties, besides the pain their habit gives to the collector, are hardly 



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