ANEMONE. 
handsome leaves come up all over the place, and from many of the 
tufts ascend the tall bare stems, about 8 inches high, each carrying 
a single very large flower, slightly nodding and fragrant, rather like 
those of a smaller and much tidier five-sepalled A. japonica, of a soft 
and warmer white, perfectly pure, yet creamy in tone. There is 
also a double form, and a variety called major or grandiflora which 
is freer in bloom than the type, and slightly larger. 
A. sinensis, to adopt the proper spelling, rather than the old 
«‘ chinensis,” is the Purple Emperor of the Pulsatilla group, having 
leaves and blooms after the style of Halleri, but the flower very much 
larger and very much more brilliant, with many more sepals to its 
radiance. It is A. sinensis that blooms in spring between the flagstones 
of dead emperors’ graves so gloriously in Asia; in March: the only 
sign of life in that silent mountain-valley of death where the ancient 
sovereigns of China rest are the wide imperial purple stars of the 
Anemone, sitting stemless on their silken clumps of leaves (already 
unfolding with the flowers) in the crevices between the immemorial 
flagstones. This most splendid beauty has at last come into culti- 
vation, though under the false name of A. mandschuriensis ; it is 
hard to raise from seed, the seedlings having a way of miffing off 
disconsolately ; it has even proved so unsatisfactory to grow that 
gardeners have come to suspect the plant of being a vampire, drawing 
the blood of its imperial glory only from the dust of dead emperors, 
and contemptuously unable to subsist on any nutrition less august. 
However, this must surely be a libel, for it is not true that the Anemone 
never blows so violet as where some buried Asiatic Caesar may have 
bled ; on the contrary, the shimmering silver and purple clumps of 
the Anemone may be seen quite as profuse and splendid in perfectly 
plebeian ordinary ground, rough and stony, by the highwaysides, 
where, if ever anybody died or laid their dust, it assuredly was no 
emperor, but only common clay of the men who made that road : the 
immortal road by which the departed godheads were carried to 
those last palaces, each lonely in its square forest of Arbor-vitae, along 
the slopes of that vast and lonely valley of the hills where no sound of 
man or his works has since been suffered to break the calm of those 
undying dead. In point of actual fact, however, A. sinensis is 
not so rigidly confined to the neighbourhood of courts extinct, but 
ranges all across North China and Mongolia and the sad barren hills 
of Korea, growing always in places open and stony and severe. There- 
fore I believe that, in cultivation, regard must be had to this austere 
nature of the plant, and that it should be planted in deep but very 
hard soil, rocky and perfectly well-drained, in the fullest exposure to 
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