CARLINA ACANTHIFOLIA. 
one of the best, and its double form is a really decorative plant for a 
cool border, amazingly profuse and effective in flower, and no less 
generous with self-sown seedlings which come true to their parent. 
The rock-garden, however, has no need to look beyond C. trifolia, a 
beautiful woodland species from the South of Europe, which thrives 
robustly anywhere in our islands in cool soil, on the shady side of the 
rock-work at its foot, but in the warmer parts of the South and West 
becomes at last a weed of almost tropical exuberance. It forms dense 
low mats of fat trefoil leaves almost fleshy, leathery, and of a very dark 
sullen green, purple underneath ; and the conspicuous and graceful 
heads of large white flowers are produced on 3- or 4-inch stems all 
over the mass in March and April—a most pure and cheering sight, 
even as the dark heartiness of the little leaves is a potent consolation 
in winter. Of the larger sorts, again, C. macrophyila is a fine and 
lavish thing for a cool, damp corner by the water, with ample 
foliage and large pale-purple flowers on graceful stems; but as a race 
the Cardamines need not long detain our doubts or our desires. 
Carduncellus.—A group of Composites of quite tertiary claims. 
The best is C. monspeliensium, which makes a rosette of pale-green 
leathery-feathered foliage, amid which sits in summer, almost stemless, 
a spidery thistly-looking blue flower, about an inch or rather more 
across. C. minimus is sometimes offered also, and is a smaller species 
of simpler leaf. Their place is on hot, poor, and worthless banks. 
Carduus.—No Thistle is ever anything but a weed and a ramper, 
though few things are more magnificent in wild places than our own 
C. eriophorus, and the Melancholy Thistle of the North—melancholy, 
poor thing, because it has no spines. This has portly elegance and 
smooth charm and a clean fragrance (and so has its Albino), but 
soon proves so grisly an invader in the garden that it has to be 
discarded, a work which takes some seasons of unremitting toil. 
Carex is known for a pest, but C. baldensis is small and pretty, if 
you can dare admit it—a fine wee running Sedge, with little fluffs of 
white in summer on stems of 3 or 4 inches. 
Carlina acanthifolia is the huge stemless Thistle of the Alps, 
where over the dry green slopes you may see outspread upon the 
ground its glittering star of intensely spiny handsome leaves, while in 
the middle sits flat upon it an immense Everlasting-flower, suggesting 
_ Some wild water-lily invented for an evil sea by Aubrey Beardsley, 
shimmering and silvery and immortal. It thrives in any deep sunny 
loam, which should be kept poor, to preserve the stature of the 
starfish, lest it show any tendency to wax fat and taller and coarser, 
after the fashion of the handsome but “lyingly-named C. acaulis, 
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