APPENDIX. 



discoverer, ascending the mountain in the snows of February, hacked out three 

 or four tufts from 3 feet of ice. {A. Purdomii, Sp. nova.) 



Antennaria Sp. — A universal moorland wayside weed all over Kansu, with 

 umbels of white everlastings on 8-inch stems, only really silvery and attractive 

 when the seed-fluffs are gone, leaving the naked receptacle a glistering flat 

 star. It is rather a dull rubbish. 



Androsace longifolia (F 94). — I gave this plant too high rank among my 

 possibilities. In appearance the most delicate and glorious of high-alpines, it 

 is so far from being alpine at all that it is only found at low elevations in 

 the loess district, affecting particularly steep and torrid banks of iron-hard 

 loam, or loamy shingle, where it forms wide carpets of splayed-out dark- 

 green rosettes, snowed under in early May with a profusion of stemless big 

 white flowers that give it the effect of an albino A. alpina glorified beyond 

 recognition. It is always found by itself, on cliffs and scarps and banks un- 

 inhabitable to most other plants, and it never ascends much above 6000 feet, 

 luxuriating on the burning slopes about the Black Water round Siku at 4500 

 feet. A. longifolia, in fact, turns out so lowland a species as never to be either 

 happy or hardy in England by tepid conditions. It is of extraordinary 

 beauty, and though technically a Chamaejasme, because it sometimes has 2 

 flowers or more to its microscopic stems, usually gives much more the idea of 

 being a specially-superb Aretia, specially lavish in its carpets of flat snow. 



A. mucronifolia (F 319) returns to the tradition of the family, and is 

 a very high alpine, never found except in the last fine turf on the crests 

 and ridges at 13,000 to 14,000 feet, along the Min S'an. Here it makes fine 

 clumpy masses of wee rosette-balls, from almost every one of which in August 

 springs a |-inch scape unfolding a domed round head of some 3 or 4 milk- 

 white flowers with a golden eye, piling each mound of rosettes with snow, and 

 showing the wild sheep of Tibet exactly how hawthorn smells in England. 

 Now that A. longifolia has preferred so successful a claim to queen it in gardens 

 over all the Aretias, a place is left vacant for A. mucronifolia to take sovereignty 

 over all the villosa-Chamaejasme Group. For indeed it is a supreme loveliness, 

 wholly different in effect from the last. It bloomed, unfortunately, too late 

 for seed to be got, and a pinch of last year's germs collected on Thunder- 

 crown in June were too untrustworthy and few to be distributed ; our hopes 

 at present rest on dormant masses sent home in the winter. (Photograph.) 



A. Engleri proves a pretty little Andraspid, exactly like an annual version 

 of A. carnea. It constellates with its tiny pink heads the sandy waysides 

 along the enormous levels of the Honan Plain in earliest April. 



A. Delavayi has been exhibited at Edinburgh, and so may some day be to 

 be hoped for. It is a lovely Aretia, forming dense masses of tight pilules, beset 

 with stars of soft pink. Its habit and general form (but for the solitary flowers 

 of the Aretia Group) recall A. mucronifolia ; but yet more closely does it recall 

 our own A. alpina, which it replaces in similar situations beside the everlasting 

 snows in the high Alps of Yunnan. 



A tibetica (F 246).— This only doubtfully occurred to me in the Siku 



492 



