ASPERULA. 
A. longiflora, from the limestone Alps of the eastern ranges, and very 
much less rare. 
A. hirta is a smooth-leaved small species from the Pyrenees, forming 
beautiful soft fine mats of rather lax and graceful shoots, with the 
leaves narrow and smooth and green, arranged in whorls of from four to 
seven. The shoots are not more than 3 or 4 inches high or so, square 
and leafy, and end in clusters of beautiful rosy stars almost concealing 
the cushion, which has the further merit of emitting runners under- 
ground. It is a common beauty in its native Alps and has looser or 
more condensed forms, named accordingly. 
A. nitida, from the Bithynian Olympus, is yet another tuffet-plant, 
rather close, 3 or 4 inches high, with flopping twisting stems more or 
less well-clad in hairless leaves. Here again the flowers are pink. 
A. pendula depends in a very dense minutely downy mass from 
the crevices and alpine grottoes of Granada—a huddle of tiny round 
stems half an inch or two inches long, closely beset with foliage arranged 
in whorls of eight or ten, green above and hoary below. The blossoms 
are borne in quite narrow heads and are hairy outside, produced not 
from the end of the shoot only, but all the way up from the base. 
A. pontica is much the same, but the leaves of this are longer, so 
that the flower-tubes look correspondingly shorter. 
A. pulvinaris, from hill-tops of Attica at about 4000 feet, makes 
specia!ly dense tufts, 4 and 5 inches across, clothed in the fur, and fur- 
nished with the lovely long corollas, of Sibthorb’s A. suberosa, with 
sharp little leaves, seeming double-grooved because of the salient 
median nerve, and with a flattened edge, arranged in whorls of four. 
A. suberosa, or A. Athoa, has the too-frequent honour of lending its 
name to A. arcadiensis. Of this honour it is so amply worthy as well 
to deserve its own rightful name to itself. For it makes a beautiful 
close cushion, from a fat woody-barked stock, of short fine undivided 
stems, leafy, especially towards the base, with sharp and short up- 
standing narrow leaves arranged in whorls of four, the whole thing 
forming a densely hoary fluffet of grey velvet. The flowers are pro- 
duced not from the ends of the shoots alone, but also from the axils of 
the upper leaves, thus producing a loose spike of blossom about 
2 inches long ; and are of a lovely glowing pinkness, delicate trumpets, 
but almost exactly half the length of those of arcadiensis ; in addition 
to which they are not waxy-smooth outside, but roughened with a very 
minute soft bristliness. This plant, were it not for the remote and 
too rarely realised supremacy of the A. arcadiensis whose place it 
so often usurps, would certainly be the queen of the race. It comes 
from the high and holy summit of Athos, whence it draws its invalid 
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