ACANTHOLEIMON. 
A. androsaceum, a false name for A. Echinus, q.v. 
A. araxanthum, though beautiful with long leaves and lax long 
plumes of white flower, is not likely to be of much help to our 
gardens, belonging, as it does, to the hot fields of Araxes. 
A. armenum has shorter leaves than the last, denser spikes and 
smaller flowers. A. Balansae is a variety of this, and sometimes is 
offered under the name of A. Haussknechtit. 
A. avenaceum, from Khorassan, earns its name with a long fine 
single purple blossom-shower, as it were an oat’s, rising some foot or 
so above the clump. 
A. Balansae belongs to A. armenum, q.v. 
A. Bodeanum forms a very dense close tuft of green spiny foliage 
(with velvety varieties, pictum, cappadocicum, cataonicum), and the 
flower-spike is tight and dense too, dividing into two branches, with 
flowers overlapping each other, in chaffy bracts of bright purple. 
A. Calvertii, on the contrary, is much closer in look and habit to 
our well-known A. glumaceum, but is of a disposition so much milder 
as hardly to be prickly at all. Its flowers, too, are of a richer purple. 
(Armenia.) 
A. caryophyllaceum, from Kurdistan, has a strong general re- 
semblance in fatness and length of intensely spiny leaf to A. acerosum, 
.but its foliage is so wholly devoid of lime as to be of a pale green. 
The bloom-spikes are undivided, and the chaffy calyx veined outside 
with violet. 
A. diapensioeides must indeed be longed for: in its habit and 
size of leaf it exactly resembles a close tuffet of Saaxifraga caesia. 
So far this delight of Kok-i-Baba mountain in Afghanistan has never, 
I think, rejoiced our gardens with a sight of its short fat leaves. But 
to call a thing Diapensioeides is to make it even more desirable than if 
one called it Allionii (and perhaps less difficult) ; so that after unrest- 
ing efforts we must surely one day possess this. 
A. Echinus, wrongfully dethroned from its specific rank in some 
lists, is in reality the plant that lurks in others under the name of 
A. androsaceum. It forms a perfectly tight mass of green spines 
from which the velvety glandular few-flowered spikes hardly rise at 
all; the flowers are white, but their enclosing chaffy star is veined 
with purple. 
A. Fominii belongs to A. lepturoeides, q.v. 
A. glumaceum is the best known of its race, forming wide rather 
lax cushions, of green and rather lax spiny leaves, from which spray 
freely abroad its delicate flowers of pink all through the summer. 
This species, so far the most amenable—perhaps because the longest 
