VIOLA. 



V. gomphopetala= V. erect i folia, q.v. 



V. gracilis lives only in Macedonia and the mountains of Asia 

 Minor, the plants of South Italy and Greece being impostors. No 

 garden introduction of the last century has been more lovely and 

 delightful than this violet, in the habit and of the vigour of V. cornuta, 

 much neater in the dense upstanding armies of its blossom, and with 

 its rather nobler and profuse great violet -pansies of the most shimmer- 

 ing imperial purple velvet, with a tweak to the petals that gives each 

 flower an inimitable butterfly grace. It grows with the utmost 

 readiness in any light soil, rich and open, and can be propagated from 

 cuttings like any bedding Pansy. Seed sometimes yields a creamy- 

 citron-coloured form, but much more often proves the influence of 

 other species in the garden on the impressionable nature of the Gracious 

 Pansy. And, though these mules are always going forth under 

 pompous names, such as Purple Robe, &c, and though they are all 

 definitely larger and stouter purple pansies of much beauty, they 

 have utterly lost, for that look of fat rounded solidity, the freakish, 

 elfin loveliness of V. gracilis, no less than its intensity of dark and 

 velvety violence. 



V. gracillima is a large-flowered, purple form of V. lutea, with the 

 lower leaves huddled together, and the pansies standing out on long 

 stems of 7 inches or so. 



V. grandiflora=V. Clementiana, q.v. 



V. hastata is a small and delicate leafy-stemmed American wood- 

 land violet. 



V. hederacea is the delicacy which for so many years has been called 

 Erpetion reni forme. The New Holland Violet does not deserve the 

 reputation for mifnness and tenderness that overclouded it — most 

 probably and reasonably because it was Australian, and good things 

 are less rare out of Galileo than hardy ones out of Australia. In any 

 light rich soil, rather moist if not shady, this violet makes wide, 

 running, clumped carpets of neat and vivid kidney-shaped bright- 

 green leaves, from which, all the summer through, on naked stems of 

 2 or 3 inches, springs an incessant show of rather starry little purple 

 violets, fading definitely to white at the tips of their petals, with a 

 most distinct effect of personality and grace. In due time the plant 

 seeds itself all over the bed, and both young and old alike seem 

 astonishingly resistent to our climate, though for safety's sake it is 

 no bad thing to dig off a clump or two from the fringe of the colony, 

 and pol them up securely through the winter. 



V. heterophyUa=V. Dubyana. 



V. hirsutula lives in dry ? rich American woods, a small plant with 



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