ANEMONE. 
starry cups with the golden tassel at their heart lie thick upon the 
sere ground under the wild skies of March, before the little silky 
ferny foliage on which they sit so close at flower-time has fully 
developed its leaflets. As time goes by both leaves and stem grow up, 
and in the garden A. Pulsatilla forms a waving mass of foliage and tall 
seed-heads, totally different from the neatness that its starvation diet 
enforces in nature. The tuft at first is silky-grey, but ultimately 
becomes less silky, though hardly less grey ; the leaves are not lobed, 
but gashed to the stem on either side, each strip being then itself cut 
and cut again into narrow pointed little thongs, the whole effect being 
like that of a grey carrot to a casual glance. The blossoms are held 
erect, are densely silky outside, and of a rich purple. As they grow 
old, indeed, and the stem gets tall (ultimately attaining to a foot or 
more), they tend to droop, but their first inclination is to be audacious 
and confront the sky, especially when wild and in their stemless stage. 
The sepals also are notably full and outspread and longer than the 
stamens, a clear note to distinguish it from A. pratensis; while its 
distribution separates it from A. montana, whose leaves are green not 
grey, and whose flower is bell-shaped and nodding. From A. patens, 
among other points, it differs in having the leaves not lobed into three 
finely cut and re-cut segments, but gashed down the stem into no less 
finely feathered divisions. In gardens the species has sometimes been 
confused with A. Halleri, an unintelligible error when we remember 
Halleri’s taller stalk, and much broader simpler leaf-lobings shaggy 
with silver wool. In cultivation the only complaint against A. Pul- 
_ satilla is that it grows too well and gets a little rank, losing something 
of its brilliancy and neat and gem-like beauty as you see it constella- 
ting the green downs of Chateau-Gaillard with its gold-eyed stars of 
violet, or reminding the sere Campagna of the days when Rome wore 
purple. There are many paler and darker forms of A. Pulsatilla, and 
a pretty albino called White Swan. But by far its loveliest develop- 
ment has just been introduced to cultivation under the barbarous and 
intolerable name of Mrs. van der Elst—no doubt a most admirable 
person, but this pernicious habit of giving ugly human names to 
beautiful flowers ought to be rigidly confined to artificial products 
like roses and carnations, without being inflicted on the wild children 
of the hills, on which they sit so cumbrously and with so much more 
grotesque an air. In any case this form of Pulsatilla is of extraor- 
dinary charm (which makes the name so much the worse)—being 
indistinguishable from the type, except that its chalices are of a soft 
rosy shell-pink, absolutely clean and true, without the slightest taint 
of mauve or magenta. This seems less healthy than the type in 
‘ 75 
