ACAENA. 
A. adscendens is far from the prostrate condition so valuable in 
the family, and is a large coarse thing of straggling and weedy habit, 
with stout 4 to 8 inch stems, short stout bristles, and leaves rounded, 
grey, glabrous, glaucous, and coarsely toothed. 
A. ageratifolia is a larger ascendent plant with very fine green 
foliage like a neatly condensed fern. 
A. argentea, a most lovely species from Chile, forms a mat of 
grey soft foliage. 
A. Buchananit is closely prostrate and branchy. ‘The little pale 
grey leaves are made up of three to six pairs of small round or oval 
folioles, with minute deep toothing at their edge. The bristles of 
the flower-head are yellow, and the species is a New Zealander. 
A. digitata is a Chilean species, of no very special charm in my 
eyes. 
A. glabra may be known among its kin by being perfectly smooth, 
without hairs or bristles of any kind. Nor does it ever produce 
bristles even in the flower-heads; but these, though quite unarmed, 
are hedgehoggy with stamens, in the case of the male flowers. 
(New Zealand.) 
A. glauca is singularly beautiful—a prostrate plant with little 
silky rosaceous leaves, of a soft grey-blue tone. 
A. lucida, from the Antarctic Islands, is a less carpeting mass, 
whose foliage suggests that of Anthemis montana, though narrower 
in form. 
A. lyrata, if the name have authority, is an attractive species, 
with the leaflets broad, and rounded along the leaf, suggesting the 
effect of a Ceterach-fern, but grey and thick, with the final lobe of the 
leaf larger than the rest, which diminish towards the base of the stem. 
Each lobe is prettily scalloped, and the whole growth has great attrac- 
tion, though the flowers, borne in minute rounded heads, are not so 
much inconspicuous as hideous. 
A. microphylla, on the contrary, is certainly the reigning favourite 
in our gardens, not only on account of its charming smooth rose-like 
foliage, varying from rosy-bronze to a beautiful blue-grey tone, but 
also, and no less, for the innumerable little round balls of flower that 
sit about all over the carpet, shock-headed with long spines of bright 
crimson. This species hails from New Zealand, and sometimes ap- 
pears under the synonyms of A. depressa and A. inermis. 
A. Novae Zelandiae, whose provenance is thus left in no doubt, 
is a marked improvement on the larger species, and well known in 
gardens. Here the stock is stout and woody and creeping, with up- 
rising stems, clothed in silky leaves made up of four to seven rounded 
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