COLCHICUM. 
bell’s outside, which ranges from colours that may be called subtle 
to others that can only be called dowdy and indecisive. Among the 
species, all being of general similarity, and all being raised easily 
from seed, are : 
C. affinis, with flowers of greenish tone and veined with purple ; 
C. Benthamii, lurid purple-yellow, rather like a henbane ; C. ¢lematidea, 
reaching 3 or 4 feet in height, with flowers of white, stained with 
blue; C. convolvulacea, a most beautiful but almost unprocurable 
rarity, with bells of lovely clear blue, even outside; C. Meleagris, a 
novelty, rather leafy, and with fat-looking Campanulas hanging on very 
long erect pedicels of half a foot or more, so as to make a fine show 
of their beauty, for they are of the faintest shade of blue, each lobe with 
a backbone and radiating reticulations of chocolate ; C. ovata, a name 
more frequently found than its rightful bearer, for which C. clematidea 
as a rule does duty; C. ovata has bells that widen inwards to their 
base, and the colour is of sky-blue or white, rather smaller than in 
C. clematidea, and the growth is clothed all over in fine down, whereas 
C. clematidea is more or less smooth; C. purpurea, which rambles 
and does not twine, with glaucous foliage and ‘large bells of purple ; 
C. rotundifolia, with scalloped foliage, and flowers of purple or greyish 
blue; C. subsimplex, resembling C. Benthamiu, but with a wider bell 
of blue; C: thalictrifolia, whose blossoms are tubular and _ ill-smell- 
ing; C. lanceolatq, attaining 2 or 3 feet, with bells of lilac, darker 
inside ; together with other species a-many, and all much of a much- 
ness—C. tang-sheng, C. ussuriensis, C. viridiflora, C. viridis, &e. 
Colchicum has an evil colour but a valuable blooming season, 
even though the coarse handsomeness of the contemporaneous or 
subsequent leaves unfits them for the choicer associations that 
otherwise their cups of magenta-lilac would ask. Their best place, 
though they will thrive almost anywhere, is in deep and sunny soil, 
coming up in colonies and clusters, through a carpet of Acaena or 
Cotula, which will thus protect their blossoms from the mud splashed 
up by the autumn rains that wreck their effect in open ground (even if 
they are not destroyed by the slugs that nibble them into a disreputable 
damaged look). Though some of the species are choice, all are of 
facile culture—should be planted fairly deep, and may be multiplied 
in summer, when the leaves die down, by division of the clumps. 
C. agrippinum (not, apparently, devoted to the wicked Augusta, as 
C. Agrippinae) is a rather stouter and erect-leaved form of C. varie- 
gatum, blooming in October and of unknown origin. 
C. alpinum, a lovely and most rarely-seen little Autumn Crocus of 
the greatest delicacy, that breaks daily through the mown grass of the 
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