CROCUS. 
SECTION IV.—TUNIC OF STRONG PARALLEL FIBRES 
C. aureus, with its flowers of gleaming metallic gold, opening in 
the dawn of spring, has the terrible responsibility of being parent 
to many Fat Boys of the garden and grass plots, no less than of many 
wild forms such as C. lagenaeflorus, C. maesiacus, the pale C. sul- 
phureus, and the rare lovely C. lacteus of milky pallor. It is indeed 
a most gorgeous and delicate beauty, by no means to be excluded 
from the company of the choice, if only for the fact that this is the 
golden-rayed Crocus that shone upon way-worn Oedipus in Koivnos 
as heartily as to-day in our borders on us, though the Crocus and 
Oedipus and the nightingales and the Daphnes have all departed 
from Kolonos long ago. 
C. candidus lives in Asia Minor. It has especially broad foliage, 
and the white cups are diversely feathered with lilac, but yellow and 
orange forms are known. 
C. Korolkowti is golden as a Celandine, and browned on the outside. 
It has a very large flat corm, lives in Turkestan, and flowers from 
December to February. 
SECTION V.—TUNIC SPLITTING INTO RINGS AT 
THE BASE 
C. aérius, a rather delicate, lovely fairy, with a soft rind to its 
corm, and starry cups in a dozen different tones, with featherings of 
purple and crimson. 
C. biflorus is called the Scotch Crocus because it belongs to the 
Mediterranean basin from Tuscany to Georgia, a neat and lovely 
small joy of extraordinary freedom and vigour in the garden, which 
is crammed in spring with colonies and clusters of neat clumped 
flowers feathered with purple on their buff-pale outsides, and within 
of the loveliest silver-lavender. The blooms are very variable, alike 
in colour and in feathering ; catalogues perpetually offer new named 
forms, for this Crocus, appearing in spring, has attained to public 
recognition as a decent, orderly-minded plant, with none of its cousins’ 
ill-regulated habit of glorifying a time of year when no respectable 
Crocus can be expected to be up and out of bed, except on pain of 
being ignored; and there are also many local varieties, forms or 
sub-species, such as C. nubigenus, C. Weldeni, C. estriatus, C. Adami, 
and C. Alexandri. 
C. chrysanthus can be told from all other golden Crocus by the 
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