VIOLA. 



V. linguaefoUa makes a plant of about a foot high, with tongue- 

 shaped foliage, and bright yellow violets. 



V . lu8%tanica=V. canina lancifolia. 



V. I atca is the delicate and lovely little mountain pansy that in 

 the English alps by no means inadequately replaces V. calcarata, and 

 turns the meadows of Teesdale into a foaming sea of pansies, smaller 

 indeed, but no less rich and undulating and diverse in their colour- 

 shades, from the pallor of first dawn to the richness of Nero's cloak. 

 In the garden V. lutea is indestructible and perpetually in bloom, but 

 tends to hybridise almost too freely with the Tricolors and Cornutas, 

 producing endless fatter and more golden versions, called Golden 

 Drop, &c., which have changed the long, thin daintiness of V. lutea s 

 pre-Raphaelite face, for such rounded obesity as soon shades on into 

 nothing more elegant than the fatness of the bedding Violas, in which 

 V. lutea has indeed had so large a share. Only wild types of this, 

 accordingly, should be grown, and these grown on again from cuttings. 



V. Lyallii has white flowers, and seems to be the best of the rather 

 feeble violets offered us by Now Zealand. 



V. macedonica stands quite close to V. tricolor; but yet closer to 

 V. vivariensis, in that it is soundly perennial. It straggles among the 

 ferns on the hills of Macedonia, a blue-purple pansy of 12 inches, 

 differing from the others, too, in that its petals stand widely apart 

 the one from the other, so that the pansy -face has a wild and 

 startled expression. 



V. magellanica comes from very far away in the Antarctic Islands, 

 where it plays at being a V. odorata with yellow flowers. Others of 

 this remote race are V. ovalifolia, V. sericea, V. argentea, V. Coin- 

 mersonii. 



V. magellensis makes yet another of that wonderful and beautiful 

 group that calls Mammola rupina mother. For this is a most tiny 

 huddled roiniaturo of V. cenisia from high sandy places on Majella in 

 the Central Apennines. 



V. minuta has similar relationship, but fills a missing link between 

 V. cenisia and V. alpina. It is a neat and lovely velvet -grey tuft 

 of almost round, tiny, scalloped leaves on short stems ; its purple 

 pansies are smaller than in V. cenisia, and the scalloping on the leaves 

 much more pronounced. To V. alpina it approaches, among other 

 points, in its condensed clumped habit, which it practises in the high 

 of Kasbck and Iberian Caucasus. 



V. mirabilis cannot live up to its name. In the alpine woods it 

 makes brunky of clawed and finoly divided foliage, among 



which spring comparatively insignificant sweet-scented palo violets. 



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