ANEMONE. 
A. mupinensis. See under A. japonica. 
A. narcissiflora is always and everywhere a well-beloved friend, 
easily adorning cool or sunny copsy corners in the rock-garden, with 
its soft fan-shaped, deep-cut leaves, and its foot-high heads of six to 
ten lovely flowers exactly like so many Apple-blossoms. Occasionally 
it may damp off in winter if the soil be too heavy, nor does its life 
appear to exceed six or seven years; but during that time it goes on 
from season to season in ever-increasing splendour, and looks specially 
characteristic if small ferns share its home, and the alpine Columbines 
among which it is so often found. It is a generally abundant species 
(apparently quite indifferent—pace other authorities, who call it a 
lime-lover—as to the soil or rock it grows on), not only in the Alps, 
where it has its centre in the main chains, but also all over the great 
mountain ranges of the Old World and across the Behring Straits into 
America, creeping down to South Park in the Colorado Rockies, and 
in Yunnan attaining actually to the tropic of Cancer. It is a lover of 
open places in sub-alpine and alpine woods, or in the meadows just 
above, where it often makes the turf a dense waving Narcissus-field 
of fallen Apple-blossoms, as on one open copsy shoulder, I remember, 
of the Cottian Alps, looking far out over the Plain of Lombardy. 
Being so widely-travelled, A. narcissiflora takes many marked forms 
as it goes, especially in the Caucasus and the high mountains of 
Asia, whence two of them have lately come to us, clothed in the 
solemn preciousness attaching to ““new species.” These are A. narcissi- 
flora var. demissa, in Eastern Asia from Tibet to Kamschatka, a 
fluffy form, with softer and less divided foliage and weaker stems, and 
A. n. var. polyanthes, ranging the other way from Tibet to Kashmir, 
with abundant heads of blossom. There is also a one-flowered variety, 
A.n. monantha; and yet another is already to hand from Russia as 
A. villosissima (sometimes A. villosa), an extra-specially fluffy form of 
an already fluffy type. All these are beautiful, but must be guarded 
against when they ask seven and sixpence for themselves as “‘new 
species,” being in reality only local varieties of a type, almost more 
beautiful and charming still, that sells at eighteenpence. (See 
Appendix.) 
A. nemorosa, though only the common Wood-anemone, need not 
be ashamed to uphold its swinging delicate head among the proudest 
beauties of the race. It has by this time developed many lovely 
forms, and it is especially curious how in the far West of Wales, 
England, and Ireland, its colour tends to change into the most beauti- 
ful blues that even reach the clear soft brilliancy of A. apennina. 
Many of these have names; especially beautiful is A. n. Allenit, 
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