ANEMONE. 
that Adonis has indeed the weight of age, appropriateness, and 
romance ; and that we ought now to twist our tongues to the pro- 
founder music of Anemone. But who will ? 
Very few of the Anemones are rock-plants, the race being sub- 
alpine and alpine, descending also to the fields at much lower eleva- 
tions, and abundant in the New World as in the Old, though there for 
the most part vastly inferior. Yet so important is the family, in 
the rock-garden especially, and so many are the dingy new species 
now creeping into commerce undescribed, on their way through our 
purses straight to the rubbish-heap, that the species must surely be 
dealt with in detail. And in so dealing let us include Pulsatilla and 
Hepatica, two groups of Anemone nowadays by some botanists re- 
moved each into a race of its own. All the Anemones but a few are 
temperate in their tastes, and in cultivation only the woodland section 
likes coppice and shade and moist cool soil. The alpine section, on 
the contrary, enjoys a soil that is very deep and rich and cool indeed, 
but with full exposure to sun and air; the meadow group is happy in 
the same conditions, but, being dwarfer, needs a position more in the 
foreground. The blooming season opens with A. blanda in February, 
ranges right through the summer, with A. rivularis taking up the 
mantle of its predecessors that have filled the earlier months, and 
closes at last with the late frosts that massacre the profuse remaining 
buds of A. japonica and A. vitifolia. Nearly all Anemones come readily 
and generously from seed, but it is essential that the seed should be 
sown as fresh as possible, for in the seed of Anemone the living germ 
has but little surrounding nourishment to keep it alive, and soon, if 
not sown, has devoured all its envelope and dies of inanition, impatient 
and frustrate. The running species can also be pulled to pieces, or 
their offsets removed at pleasure; but all the clump-forming kinds 
acutely resent division (they do not even readily condone removal), 
and take a season or two to recover. 
A. acutiloba is a North American of no merit. 
A. albana may merely be a high-alpine form of A. pratensis, but 
here the divisions of the root-leaves are shorter and blunter, their 
lobes being oblong rather than sharp-pointed, while the leaf-frill that 
envelops the bloom is also much less slit and gashed. The leaves 
appear with the buds in early spring; and the single-flowered stems 
are some 4 or 5 inches high, with large blossoms varying in colour 
from milky white through yellows to pale-blue, rather nodding and 
bell-shaped, and never violet as in Pratensis. (Alpine meadows of 
Kastern Caucasus, and away to India.) Cultivation is quite easy in 
any deep soil and open bank. 
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