ARMERIA. 
plete and tangled catalogue from all the many species that fill the 
shores of the South. 
A. alpina, from the Alps and Pyrenees, is a good low-growing clump; 
so is our own Sea-pink A. maritima, with its improved garden form 
A. Laucheana, and yet another called A. bracteata rubra, with flowers 
of specially virulent colour—for the curse of Armeria is to be either 
pallid or aniline in tone. A. vulgaris, A. labradorica, and A. planta- 
ginea (perhaps only a broader-leaved form of A. maritima) are others 
of the same persuasion ; and A. Boissieriana, with hard stiff glaucous 
leaves and a profusion of pink flower-heads on stems of 6 or 12 inches, 
is an improvement on these; while A. pungens forms dense intricate 
but repellent cushions of very stiff blue-grey foliage incurving and 
pitilessly spiny, with flowers above it of palest pink on 12-inch stems. 
Of the taller-growing species incomparably the finest is A. latifolia, 
which is also A. cephalotes, A. formosa, and A. pseudo-armeria of gardens 
—a, really superb thing, in tufts of flaccid leaves, broad and mild and 
bright green, with stems of 2 feet or so, carrying very large heads of 
very large flowers in a clear and striking tone of glowing pink. This 
beauty belongs to the mountains of Valentia, and should have a rather 
poor soil and a warm well-drained position in the sun if it is to prove 
a safe and enduring perennial (but like all the rest it can be easily 
raised from seed ; even as, like the rest, it blooms through summer to 
autumn). In our gardens it is as affable as well-known. 
Other tall-growing species are: A. macrocephala, only less fine, with 
erect leaves, elongate and narrow and incurved and prickly, and big 
pink heads on stems of 2 to 3 feet; A. baetica, with hard glaucous 
foliage and stout stalks; A. pinifolia, more graceful, a downy and 
densely-tufted species from the coasts of Spain; and A. magellensis, 
quite elegant and charming, with rather greyish narrow-leaved tutts, 
bending stems, and rather small heads of pretty aneemic blossoms. The 
jewels, however, of the race—though A. setacea and A. juncea may 
be admitted—are the rock species, with A. splendens at their head. 
A. caespitosa is a most lovely plant, forming tight dense clumps 
of splayed-out narrow-leaved and tiny rosettes, suggesting those of 
some strange Androsace, and on these are crowded the almost stemless 
chaffy heads of large palest pink flowers, whose only possible reproach 
is that they are a trifle washy and diaphanous and undecided in colour. 
None the less this species is a little alpine treasure for close crevices in 
rock-work, in light and well-drained soil; it may be seen especially 
luxuriant at Edinburgh, though its home is at some 6000 or 8000 feet 
in the Sierra de Guadarrama. . 
A. filicaulis haunts the same rocky and alpine positions in the 
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