CRISTARIA COCCINEA. 
branching stems producing pink flowers in a powdery involucre ; 
C. rubra from South Italy; and C. lagoseris with wide-cxpanded, 
silky, cobwebbed leaves, and tallish stems of large blue-purple blossom. 
Chalky cliffs of Taurus; while C. incisa is found at some 6000 feet in 
the Alps of Greece. These ought to have a place in the garden, if 
only for their summer flowering. 
Cristaria coccinea—Malvastrum coccineum, g.v. 
Crocus.—tThis precious race is still so unknown in the rock-garden 
that when the name is suggested for its glorification in autumn, nine 
people out of ten have never realised that there are any autumn 
Crocus, and think that Colchicum must be meant. Nor have even 
the vernal species come to their own in the rock-garden, perhaps 
because borders and grass-plots are so full of blowzy florists’ Crocus 
(lovely in their place, indeed), that popular imagination cannot admit 
of any cousin of such being appropriate among the stones. Yet 
nothing in the world is better suited there, or looks so well, as these 
delicate fairies, whose grace makes impossible ’Arriets of even the most 
splendid garden forms. These indeed must never be admitted to the 
rock-garden, but all its high and low places, flat expanses, and open 
slopes cry aloud to be set thickly with Crocus species, litle lovely 
things that do no harm, and never get in the way of even the choicest 
plants, and die away as soon as they possibly can after their hour of 
radiance so specially welcome, either in the wilderness of January or 
in that of October and November. The race is wholly Southern, and 
its blooming period goes the whole round of the year’s clock. But 
many of the species accordingly are not fitted for culture out of doors 
in England, as the muds and floods of mid-winter wreck their delicate 
loveliness of blossom. And, indeed, all the species are best planted 
under a carpet of something else, not only for the protection of the 
Crocus bloom itself, but also that the something else may have its 
hour of glory when the Crocusisno more. Arenaria balearica, Cotula, 
the Acaenas, Veronica repens, Hypericum reptans, all leap to mind as 
being admirable carpets to associate with Crocus for the mutual 
benefit of both, and the gardener will easily think of a dozen more— 
to say nothing of prostrate shrubs like the precious Cotoneasters 
glacialis, congesta, adpressa, and humifusa. Or they may be set 
between choicer alpines, and their corms provide just the company 
enjoyed by Potentilla nitida, Primula minima, Dianthus alpinus, and 
Gentiana verna ; nor do they ever look better than when they emerge 
from those glossy green mats and tuffets in autumn and early spring, 
even as does C. albiflorus on the Alps. And, yet again, the light 
cover of the Aethionemas, Alsine, Linum tenuifolium, the smaller bushy 
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