ASTRAGALUS. 
twelve pairs of oval leaflets. There is a white form of this also, no 
less worthy of cultivation than the species, which is a genuinely 
pretty thing. 
A. monspessulanus, however, is the jewel of the family, as we now 
have it in our gardens, of which it is an unquestionable ornament. It 
grows into wide but graceful masses of quite dwarf tufts of prostrate 
habit, running underground ; the leaves are quite long and narrow, 
made up of the most delicate small pairs of leaflets, rather distant, so 
as to give the effect of a drawn out and etiolate frond of Aspleniwm 
trichomanes, darkened, weak, dulled, and magnified; while among 
these on dwarfish stems rise up the long loose spikes of big nodding 
flowers, of a vinous red-purple. 
A. Onobrychis, again, is not unworthy of a place. It forms lax 
downy tufts, as much as 18 inches across; the leaflets are rather 
narrow, and much more distant than in the last ; and the large bluish- 
purple flowers stand up in heads well above the foliage. 
A. Tragacantha is the most illustrious of the group, as its name 
says that it produces tragacanth-gum—which it doesn’t ! 
OTHER SUGGESTED ASTRAGALI OUT OF A 
THOUSAND 
A. apollineus, a 4-inch tuffet of grey with short ascending stems 
and most attractive flowers of red-violet. Rare: on Parnassus. 
A. argyrothamnus, a silver-sheeny mound of fine thorns from 
Lebanon, making a round densely-branching bush, with violet blossoms 
at the base of microscopic leaves, whose place the thorns have taken 
in the plant’s development—dry desert-ground species tending to 
develop thorns at the expense of foliage, so as not to tempt browsers 
with the one, and so as to avert them with the other. 
A. cadmicus, a silky crevice-plant, 2 to 6 inches high, with violet- 
keeled blooms. (High regions of Lycia and Cappadocia.) 
A. Chamaeleuke, densely silky prostrate and almost stemless, with 
many 2-inch foot-stalks, carrying from three to eight large flowers of 
light violet, more than an inch long. (From the Alps of Wyoming, 
Montana, and Idaho.) 
A. chionophilus duly loves the snow, as its name tells us. For it is 
found at great elevations in stony places beside the melting snow in 
the mountains of Isauria and Cappadocia—a densely silky thing again, 
with fine thread-like shoots, leaves an inch long, and big violet 
blossoms. 
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