ACTAEKA. 
CLIMBING ACONITES. 
albo-violaceum, a straggly species from Manchuria, with very 
broad divisions to the hairy leaves, and long spikes of blue and white 
helmets, exceedingly long and high in the cap. The plant is a very 
handsome one for damp and shady places, to ramble over other things. 
Barrii, dark violet flowers, earlier than those of Vilmorinianum ; 
and a hardier habit, if that be necessary. 
Hemsleyanum, a variety of the Japanese A. Szukinii, broad leaves, 
hardly divided to the middle, and rambling spikes of dark violet 
flowers, usually some ten to the spike. 
villosum, from the Altai, an immense ramper, attaining 12 feet, 
one of the most robust and the handsomest, with clear blue flowers 
in July, well before all the others of this late-blooming group. The 
plant is thickly hairy, and the leaves more finely cut than in the next. 
Vilmorinianum is even longerthan the last ; it produces deep violet 
flowers in September. 
volubile, with two forms, broad- or narrow-lobed as to the leaf- 
divisions, and flowers slightly hanging, from dark bronze violet to a 
more sombre note, tinged with green. All these species are easy to 
raise from seed, though germination is sometimes slow; and all can 
be multiplied at pleasure by division. Their place is, with the gorgeous 
exception of Wilsoniz, rather in the wild garden, or away in savage 
and shady moist reaches of the great rock-garden, than in the general 
border. At the same time even there they may have a plaee ; while 
in situations more natural they have a special value either as columns 
of blue and ominous darkness in rough places, or rambling wildly 
about over shrubs and among them, running up at last to outrival 
Vicia cracca in the embraces of Liliwm auratum, and supersede the 
violet fires of the vetch with a more profound note of blue as the 
season draws on. 
Actaea.—All the many catalogue-names in this race—rubra, 
nigra, and so forth—boil themselves down at last into the names of two 
sound species. A. alba is the North-American version, a taller thing 
than ours, of less ample foliage, with leaves more sharply divided ; 
while our own A. spicata is dwarfer, with very handsome spreading 
leaves, suggesting a smooth and lax little Spiraea Aruncus. Actaea 
spicata is a universal plant of Kuropean mountain-woods, and strays 
into the alpine region of England. There are high level wastes of 
stone under Ingleborough where, far down in the dark crevasses 
between the blocks of limestone, wave plumy jungles of Herb-Chris- 
topher, the fluffy little white spikes, like those of some Spiraea, shining 
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