CROCUS. 
C. corsicus, also in February and March, sends up only one spathe 
round each bud, and the stigmata of the purpie blossoms are 
scarlet. 
C. etruscus has very coarsely netted tunic-coats, but its blooms are 
of supreme elegance, the three outer segments being pale buff-coloured 
outside and feathered with purple, while the three inner ones are of 
soft blue-lavender inside and out. The flower is long and graceful, 
opening into a beautiful star of clear blue, looking its best and proving 
most permanent in rather rough grass, where it blooms in April. A 
most variable species in its featherings. 
C. Tommasinianus comes into bloom in February and March, with 
beautiful long cups of lavender-blue that are often white on the 
outside and have a white beard to their throat inside. (Eastern 
Europe.) One of the hardiest. 
C. vernus is a parent of the fat garden dummies that have 
no place in our territories, be they never so gorgeous and bloated 
(so obese, indeed, as to make one feel that there must be aesthetic 
feelings at work in the beaks of the sparrows that so assiduously pick 
them off or peck them to pieces). The true species has a delicate 
purple bloom, and is naturalised in several places in England. The 
variety C. v. leucorrhyncus is fat indeed, but redeemed by the white 
tip to its sheeny cup of satiny violet; but far more beautiful is C. 
albiflorus, now raised to specific rank on the Continent—the dainty 
Snow-crocus of the Alps, that not only takes the place of the departing 
snow with its milky drifts, but is even in such a hurry to do so that 
it pushes its long, narrow cups (like old-fashioned fluted champagne 
glasses) of opalescent white or purple so sturdily through the hard- 
wrought whiteness itself, that over all its surface they stand expanded 
in the early days of June on the heights, long after they have become 
little more than the memory of lank grass down in the valleys below. 
But C. albiflorus is not quite so free or so ready to re-establish itself as 
less elevated and exalted forms of C. vernus. 
AUTUMN-BLOOMING SPECIES 
C. hadriaticus blooms in October among the miseries of Albania 
—a species very near C. sativus, but almost always white-chaliced, 
and sometimes with a yellow throat. 
C. longiflorus sees the old year sad upon its way, at leaving in 
the garden a thing so beautiful and sweet at the merciless mercy of 
the elements. For in late November come the long violet-lavender 
tubes of C. longflorus, opening to let loose on the world a flood of 
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