APPENDIX. 



fewer stems than in F 216, forming no bush and set with broader foliage of 

 glaucescent tone. The flower-heads are lax, the flowers comely and of a 

 thick and chalky lavender. Its height is from 6 to 8 inches, and its beauty 

 conspicuous and serene. Treatment, &c, as for F 246. {A. sihiensis, Sp. 

 nova; not hardy.) 



Aster Sp. (F 458). — A rather weedy wayside Aster about Gahoba, whose 

 very brilliant flowers, however, may look much better when the mass grows 

 under good culture, to a thick clump of soft, greyish stems of 10 to 14 

 inches. I find some of these " back-end " Chinese Asters intensely puzzling ; 

 each district seems to have its own form of what is, probably, one pervasive 

 species. There is a straggling Michaelmas Daisy with the habit of a poor A. 

 Thomsoni, from cool, damp groves and rill-sides about Siku, which may have 

 affinities with F 458; as, indeed, may also F 455, though this is less likely, 

 as the affinities of F 455 are rather with F 290. 



Chinese Asters of 1914. 



( F 



Alpine Group . . . . < 



( F 



Diplostephioid Group . . < ^ 



131 



226 



F173 



Acris Group 



Turbinelloid Group . . . < 



F246 

 F456 

 F290 

 455 



Astilbe Sp. (F 385) is possibly only A. Davidi. It was abundant in a 

 small stretch in the cool stony bottom of the great Siku gorge. The only flower- 

 spike, however, that I saw opening (and a mutilated one at that) seemed to 

 be of a pale soft pink. F 384 abounded in the alpine open turf above the 

 Da-hai-go in the Satanee range, and is perhaps the same, though its habit seemed 

 a trifle larger, and its spike (all I saw of it) longer and heavier. 



Boea hygrometrica Sp. (F 261) is very general throughout the hotter 

 lower loess region of South Kansu, haunting the cooler vertical faces of black 

 primary rock (or hollows round the feet of boulders) all up the course of the Black 

 Water, always in a strictly horizontal position, and there making a precise copy 

 of Jankaea Heldreichii in the flat and shaggy silver-haired rosette, until in July 

 up spring a number of naked 4-inch scapes, each expanding into a loose 

 flight of pendant little narrow Streptocarpus-flowers, of Streptocarpus lavender, 

 most beautifully contrasting with the shining silver rosette below. It is a 

 thing of the greatest charm and daintiness, and ought to prove a treasure for 

 our gardens in typical Ramondia-places and attitudes, in the cooler walls of 

 the rock-garden, not exposed to excessive rain, and apparently preferring non- 

 calcareous rock. There is a wee relation of this, not collected, with rare scapes 

 of an inch from rosettes of an inch wide, which I have only once seen, forming 

 enormous flat masses and curtains on certain cliffs just beyond Wen Hsien 

 above the White Water, where it grows all curled and wizzled with the drought. 

 (Flower unknown.) {Boea does not prove at all winter-hard in England.) 



Callianthemum Sp. (F 73). — This, as collected in May from damp cool 

 ledges in the Satanee Alps, had low outspreading foliage, very glaucous and 

 beautiful, with outlying stems of 2 to 3 inches, and very large flowers of a 



496 



