AQUILEGIA. 
from the South-west States ; it can attain more than 3 feet in height, 
and holds its golden great flowers erect ; they have ostentatious long 
spurs, and there is also an exquisite dream-like variety alba, with 
blossoms of a faint creamy white, close to one’s ideal of A. coerulea 
lepiocera. This species, too, has interbred most successfully with 
A. coerulea, its sister in beauty, and produced noble long-spurred 
delicate Columbines of the highest value, beauty, and good nature. 
A. coerulea, which is the State Flower of Colorado, is a most beauti- 
ful thing. It is smaller and slighter in habit than the rest, with foliage 
fine and frail and comparatively scant, ferny and delicate, gathered at 
the foot of the slim foot-high stems, that seem so slight to sustain the 
enormous blossoms staring straight up at the passer-by. These are of 
the most refulgent soft lavender-blue, with creamy centre of petals, and 
long, long spurs standing out from each other. Hardly any other of 
our Columbines except A. chrysantha has quite this erect-flower habit ; 
and, indeed, for diaphanous glamour and elfin grace it might easily 
be maintained that A. coerulea is queen of the family. She is also, 
however, of a temper aptly typified by her evanescent loveliness ; 
and is almost more satisfactory in many gardens if treated as a 
biennial (if pure seed can be got), seeing that thus every year one can 
arrange for the bewildering show of loveliness that the tuft always 
achieves in its second season, too often after that to disappear piti- 
lessly from a distasteful world. In cultivation, however, there is 
an endless range of hybrids between A. coerulea and the other North- 
American Columbines of the elegantula-chrysantha-flavescens kindred ; 
and the result is a garden race of superb and vigorous stalwarts, 
forming high mounds of leafage, surmounted all through the season by 
ample sheaves of long-spurred blossoms in richest constellations of rose, 
mauve, purple, and crimson, with immense spurred petals of cream 
or white or gold. But these perhaps are illegitimate developments, 
too huge and artificial for the rock-garden, with flowers fine indeed, but 
never having the uncanny size and magic of A. coerulea. There yet 
remains, however, a wild form of A. coerulea for which the choicest 
hole in our hearts and gardens is gaping. For in the high ravines of 
Utah and Colorado there is also found a plant of lower and neater 
stature than typical A. coerulea, with the same enormous upright 
flowers—but this time of a very soft uniform cream-colour verging 
towards white, and having the look of strange Eucharis-lilies gone 
astray upon the mountains. This is A. coerulea var. leptocera—a 
treasure long desired, but so far unobtained, for nurserymen always 
confuse it with the doubtful species, A. leptoceras, Fisch, and Meyer, 
which seems to be a long-spurred thing near A. vulgaris with rather 
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