ANEMONE. 
gold and violet silk, iridescent as it catches the sun in countless 
shifting shades of lilac and fawn and milk. Let no one persuade you 
that the Lady of the Snow is not beautiful, as you see her floating on 
the darkness of the earth, so dead and cold in the first moment of 
the dawn, and offering to the drowsy creatures of the air the new 
wine from her opening white chalice, brimmed over-with its foam of 
gold. At the same time truth must be told; in lower stations, and in 
later stages, the stem is longer, and the blossom looks correspondingly 
smaller ; worst of all, the Lady of the Snow clings so desperately to her 
departing beauties that she will not let them go, nor confess to growing 
old. The blossom fades but never falls, the pearly skin turns into a 
withered hag’s, till in the end that once peerless loveliness takes a 
blowzy and disreputable look, like some raddled and unreverend 
dowager in a chestnut wig; while all the while her cousin Alpina, 
more wise, is advancing honestly into the full beauty of old age, and 
reaping the reward of its honourable silver heads. A. vernalis, how- 
ever, though apparently so pure-bred an alpine, has a most curious 
distribution, and is only accidentally alpine at all. For its most 
abundant distribution is in the Scandinavian Peninsula ; from thence 
it ranges into Russia and straggles away South towards the Caucasus, 
but never gets there. It next makes a few astonishing appearances 
in North Germany and France, in situations not by any means alpine, 
but like those preferred by the Pratensis group. Then come the 
Alpine chains; and here the Anemone is abundant again, this time 
as a plant of the upmost short alpine turf, but diminishing so 
markedly as you go sunwards that it is quite hard to come upon it in 
the Cottians and Maritimes. It now, however, breaks out again to 
right and left in Transylvania and the Pyrenees, occurring after that 
sporadically all down the hills of Spain to the Sierra Nevada. In 
cultivation it is perfectly easy and pleasant, offering no difficulty at 
all, but actually preferring, contrary to intuition and experience, the 
fattest and richest of soil (in full sun, of course) if its flowers are to 
be as opulent and splendid as they are on the Alps. It is not hard 
to collect; it is readily re-established; and it comes abundantly 
from seed. 
A. virginiana is not a good plant—from 2 to 3 feet high, with soft, 
veined, ample foliage, and small yellowish stars, carried each by 
itself on a long foot-stalk, from the main stem that branches into a 
head of three or four. 
A. Wallichiana is a member of the Pulsatilla group, with six wide 
sepals very woolly outside, leaves half the stalk’s length, and the 
neck-stem above the frill twice the length of the frill itself. 
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