AQUILEGIA. 
while the plants require the sharpest and most rough drainage below 
their roots, they have a corresponding dislike to being left parched 
and torrid. Therefore, as an ideal, water ought to be flowing away 
beneath them all the summer through ; and, failing that, a sunk pot 
in the soil, periodically filled, should give them what they want. It 
will, however, be understood by anyone who has seen nearly a hundred 
square yards of ordinary rich kitchen-garden, open to all the winds and 
sunshine that descend, a wild and waving blue-and-white jungle of 
A. jucunda, that these minutiae are recommended only for the most 
miffy of the species, in districts not sub-alpine, where Columbines 
are not naturally at home. As for propagation, it is not wise to 
move or touch any Columbine that is well established. They can 
best be raised from seed, which is produced with lavish generosity and 
germinates with no less. Unfortunately the species so lavishly inter- 
breed that the offspring are hardly ever true, except in the case of a 
few species such as A. jucunda, which never seems to mar its purity 
with any other strain, or to influence the blood of its kindred. 
Aquilegia alpina is the glory and the despair of all who have ever 
seen its huge celestial crowns of loveliness waving delicately amid 
the herbage of the Mont Cenis, the Vorder Wellhorn, or the Combes de 
Barant. There can be nothing more beautiful in all nature. But 
those who have not there so seen it have no notion of the plant, its 
true habit and‘refulgence; for not only do nurserymen always sub- 
stitute for it some smaller and dingier Columbine of common blood, 
but the true A. alpina has never yet, by a curious fatality, been ade- 
quately figured. In all plates of it, either the drawing, or the colour, or 
both, have been misleading, wrong, and unfair. It is a stately and 
superb thing indeed, with leaves much ampler, greener, and cut into 
far longer, more numerous and finer lobes than those of A. vulgaris. 
One may almost, when sought and seeker both are young, mistake 
them for those of Thalictrum aquilegifolium (how just a name!). 
The stems can attain to 18 inches, carrying, each on its long stem, 
several enormous wide flowers of the most velvety deep clear-blue 
throughout, rather slack in texture, and with a brilliant golden heart 
of stamens. (It is quite a heresy to think there is a blue-and-white 
A. alpina ; the plant such heretics no doubt mean is A. jucunda— 
A. alpina being invariably and altogether of its own peculiar melting 
powder-blue.) This glorious wonder of the lower alpine copse is very 
rare indeed in the main mass of the Swiss Alps, beginning to be more 
common in the Engadine, and becoming inordinately abundant through 
the Cottian ranges down into the Maritimes, where its profusion is 
such that, above La Maddalena, for instance, close to San Dalmazzo 
90 
