AETHIONEMA. 
It is one of our most treasured beauties, alike for habit and loveliness 
of flower. 
Ae. rotundifolium (Eunomia) is a most dainty and charming little 
jewel of neat habit, from the screes of Elburs. it forms a minute neat 
tuft of 3 or 4 inches, each shoot being clothed in small round leaves of 
a most beautiful glaucous-blue metallic note, deepening sometimes to 
bronze, and cunningly enhancing the already sufficient attraction of 
the big pink flowers nestling in clusters at the tip of each spray. 
Ae. rubescens (Eunomia) is a most lovely high-alpine from the 
summits of the Cappadocian mountains, where it makes a tight and 
dense neat tuffet exactly like that of Thlaspi rotundifolium, with fine 
creeping stems and flattened fruit-heads. The blossoms are large, of 
clear pink, and the fat obovate leaves are arranged alternately to each 
other upon the stem, this being the chief particular in which the 
plant differs from the no less lovely Ae. Bourgaez. (There is, unfor- 
tunately, no convenient periphrasis for the term “obovate,” which 
is often very important as a diagnostic, and cannot be evaded. Let 
me then explain that it merely means egg-shaped, but with the broad 
end of the egg uppermost.) 
Ae. salmasium (Eunomia).—Here again we have the dainty habit 
of the high-alpine Thlaspi, and the whole growth resembles Ae. cor- 
datum, but that the leaves are of different shapes; the lower ones are 
oblong, either rounded at the base or a little drawn out, while the 
upper ones are broadly egg-shaped, pointed, and deeply heart-shaped 
at the base; the flowers are yellow. From Aderbidjan in Persia. 
Ae. saxatile is a worthless and impermanent weed with minute 
flowers. There is, however, a variety sub-species from Crete, called Ae. 
gracile, and another, Aethionema graecum, with flowers twice the size. 
Not one of these, however, is to be recommended, any more than the 
ugly and tiny-blossomed Ae. Thomasianum from the South of Europe, 
of which a fuss is sometimes delusively made in catalogues. 
Ae. schistosum sounds as if it broke away from the lime-loving 
tradition of its family. It belongs to the Cilician Taurus, forming a 
neat mass of many erect little undivided stems without branches, 
densely leafy to the tips with very narrow leaves, rather long for the 
plant and rather pointed. The pink flowers are large, and the fruit- 
head remarkably short, with big overlapping round flat pods, some- 
times broader than their length. 
Ae. speciosum is in the same range of charm—a 3- or 4-inch tuft 
of many rather erect unbranching stems, clothed in oblong egg-shaped 
blunt little leaves, of brilliant blue-grey tone. The blooms are fine 
and pink, in clusters; the fruit-heads rather lax, each pod standing 
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