ANDROSACE. 
in spring, of flowers a trifle larger perhaps, and of a much more glowing 
note of pink with a golden eye. All these forms of A. carnea, being 
smooth, and not affecting such great elevations as their rock-haunting 
cousins, are perfectly easy and permanent and hardy in English gardens 
without any trouble at all, in any kindly mixture of peat, leaf-mould, 
and gritty loam, with good drainage and an admixture of chips, to 
give them a reminder of the scantily furnished places that they love 
on the upper alpine pastures, in the loose peat of the mountain turf, 
with all the waters of the world draining sharply away far down 
beneath them, in the heart of the steep slopes on which they live. 
A. Chamaejasme, which has the privilege of giving its name to the 
group, is quite common in all the alpine turf, straggling threadily far 
and wide in the grass, with its little fluffy rosettes of rather silvery 
pointed leaves appearing here and there ; and here and there its heads 
of blossom that, beginning by being as white and ample as pearls, 
fade by degrees, through tones of cream from the yellow eye as it 
begins to run, to a soft and delicate blurred rose with a crimson central 
ring. Nor does any difficulty attend the culture of A. Chamaejasme 
in any cool open soil or moraine, in treatment suited to A. carnea ; 
and it is specially fitted to be associated with Gentiana verna. The 
species is one of the very few that overflow into the Northern regions 
of the New World, crossing from the extremities of Arctic Siberia. 
In the course of these wanderings, accordingly, it has diverged into 
many well-marked forms or varieties, some of which may some day 
be offered as unexplained new species. These are A. Chamaejasme var. 
carinata, a denser-rosetted development, with leaves so much fatter 
as to seem keeled beneath—(this is a form from the Cascade Moun- 
tains in the Rockies, and American national pride has differentiated 
it absurdly as a species, under the name of Drosace carinata); A. 
Chamaejasme var. arctica, still denser, and thickly shrouded in long 
yellowish hairs; capitata, a very good form from the Kurile Islands, 
with broader leaves and rosettes almost globular, and fine large 
flowers, two to five in a tight head, on little stems not an inch high ; 
ciliata, a smooth, glabrous variety, the leaves having a fringe of hair 
and no more; f¢riflora, robust and fleshy, clothed in transparent 
hairs ; coronata, also fleshy, but quite tight and tiny, with densely 
overlapping leaves almost forming into columns (and uniflora is a 
yet tighter and minuter form with hardly any stem at all, and one or 
two flowers at the most): both these last from grim altitudes in 
Kumaon and Western Tibet, and probably best suited, like the con- 
densed arctic forms, for cultivation in the select moraine, with water 
flowing beneath. _ 
45 
