ASTILBE. 
A. Willkommit, in the sands of Eastern Spain, makes a grey-green 
leafy plant, with heads of flowers, one to eight, each being about an 
inch across. 
Asterolinosyris Willmottiae should more rightly be called 
Linosyris. It is an interesting hybrid between Linosyris and Aster 
acris, which has succeeded in losing all the beauty of both its parents— 
arriving at a weak and muddy compromise between the clear lavender- 
blue loveliness of the Aster and the rayless gold of Linosyris. 
Astilbe has nowadays innumerable hybrids, contributed by the 
violent magenta-crimson of A. Davidii (itself as beautiful as any for 
cool moist places, beyond possibility of attacking other colours). Such 
are Solferino, Crépuscule, Princess Juliana, Lachskonigin (or the 
inevitable “‘ Salmon Queen ’’), and, finally, the most lovely of all these 
tall and fluffily beautiful pink Spiraeas for cool borders of the bog, the 
deceptively named A. x Magenta, which the prudent avoided for some 
years on account of its unfortunate name, until they discovered at 
last that it was called (almost as irrelevantly) after the battle and not 
the colour; but it is, in point of fact, a most noble fountain of long 
loose fluffy spikes in rich and tender shades of pink. A. grandis and 
A. rivularis are huge tropical splendours for the large bog, the former, 
however, not’ being a ramper like the latter, but resting content to grow 
into a massive clump from which arise its stiff six-foot spires, the more 
stately perhaps, though not so beautiful as the spouting foaming plumes 
of A. rivularis and its improved variety A. r. Moerheimit. Known 
beyond need of mention are the Chinese and Japanese Spiraeas of our 
forcing-houses, A. japonica and A. sinensis, which are not only 
beautiful and hardy themselves by the water-side, but have given us 
also delicate pink forms in Peach-blossom and the looser-plumed Queen 
Alexandra ; these, with countless more names not here in place to 
record (since every catalogue contains them and describes them—with 
new ones every season)—all resulting from marriages between A. 
Davidvi and one or other of the more gracious-spiked white species, or 
with the stately A. Thunbergii, with stems of a yard in height and its 
spires of whity pink. Their generic name is A. x Arendsiz; and though 
more and more imposing fancy titles perpetually appear, from a 
packet of seed everyone who wishes could get some equally nameable 
forms for himself, to glorify the water-side in the comparatively empty 
hours of August. Most specially within the scope of our present 
subject, however, is A. simplicifolia, a gift of the gods from Japan, 
which turned up “unbeknownst ’”’ one day in an imported mass of 
Schizocodon, and ere long revealed itself as the most lovely little 
Astilbe imaginable, for any cool moist and shady corner on the most 
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