CENTAUREA. 
C. vernicosa breaks away from all the traditions of the family, and 
achieves the most sensational loveliness. Imagine a starry rosette 
outspread upon the ground, of long and narrow-pointed foliage, 
notched here and there into faint teeth, but so fat in texture that 
these teeth take on the look and feel of little knobs (especially at the 
tips of the young leaves), and of so profoundly glossy a green that 
each looks as if it had been overlaid with several thick coatings of 
the best varnish. Then from this rosette imagine countless siems 
radiating upwards all round to the height of some 5 or 6 inches, 
and each carrying an enormous single daisy, loose-rayed, opulent, and 
splendid, of pearly white, deepening to rosy flushes at the tips, and with 
an eye of brilliant violet. Such is C. vernicosa, which in future must 
not be allowed, any more than Jane Fairfax, to waste its sweetness 
on the desert air—a maid whom there are few to praise, and fewer still 
to love. For, alas! this treasure dwells very far away on the rocks 
and mountains of the Auckland Islands, up to about 400 to 1200 feet, 
and down to the sea again in the Campbells—a plant, therefore, of 
whose hardiness there can be no reasonable doubt, if only some prince 
of romance will adventure so far into the untrodden ways in search 
of a princess so beautiful, Not to mention the other fairies that haunt 
those islands, and pin one’s eyes upon the uttermost Southern horizons 
of the world, in longings hitherto without fruit. 
Celsia, not as a rule by any means an interesting or valuable 
group of erect, yellow-flowered biennials close to Verbascum; but 
better things might be hoped of C. acaulis, which is found by the 
sources of Eurotas close beside the melting snows of Taygetos at some 
7000 feet. For this isa neat and tiny thing, alike in habit and in bloom, 
suggesting Hrodium cicutarium, with small flowers. 
Centaurea.—The Hardheads, as a rule, hover on the edge of being 
weeds, either gawky, leafy, or ineffective. However, there are some 
species admissible to the rock-garden, though none are indispensable. 
All can be raised from seed, all fiower in the summer, and all are happy 
in any sunny place. 
C. argentea is almost a one-headed C. ragusina. 
C. axillaris only differs from C. montana in having a fringe of twice 
the length to the enfolding leaflets that enclose the flower-head. 
C. babylonica, a vast and stately border-perennial with silver 
foliage and large knukb’es of yellow prolonged up the five-foot trunk. 
C. bella, from the rocks of Caucasus, is a tuft of green feathery 
leaves, hoary beneath, with starry pink flowers springing on stems of 
9 inches or so, emerging from the outside of the rosette which forms 
at the ends of the old shoots. 
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