CYCLAMEN. 
in very dark, stiff fur. In seed-time this bag proves a danger, holding 
water and rotting the capsule ; it is best to pull it away when the heads 
show signs of filling. This beautiful alpine blooms in August, and is 
of easy culture in deep, light and well-moistened stony soil, or in the 
underground-waterbed of gritty moraine mixture. Similar treatment 
will suit the similar species; C.incanus, with flowers thinner in the 
star and longer and clearer and paler, with leaves almost entire at the 
edge, and tawny fur to the calyx; C. Forrestii, a frail thing of lavender 
blossom ; C. pedunculatus, with the peduncle as well as the calyx dark 
and hairy as Esau, and with practically no white beard of flufi at the 
throat, as in C. lobatus ; C. integer, of the same habit, but with leaves 
less notched, narrow-oblong, toothed and scalloped, hairy-rough on 
both faces, but gradually becoming smooth; C. microphyllus, very 
frail and small in the leaf, with a ring at the throat, from river shingles 
high up in Kumaon, and C. leiocalyx from Yunnan, which is a smooth- 
calyxed version of C. incanus, but with yellow flowers. 
Cyclamen, though called the Bread of Sows, might more appro- 
priately have been the Food of the Gods, even as C. europaeum, 
indeed, 7s called the Patate della Madonna. For their lovely charm is 
patent to all, and needs no bush except to grow in. All the species 
can be quite happily established in loose woody corners of half shade, 
where with the aid of plenty of lime they will be glad to make them- 
selves comfortable, and the flower-heads of one year will roll up into 
tight corkscrews until the next, when they will suddenly uncoil to 
scatter their seed with such profusion and success that C. ewropaeum 
(at least) long claimed to be an English native on the strength of its 
abundance in certain woods of Kent. At the same time, the race is 
wholly Southern, and so far from being averse from sunshine that all the 
limestone screes of the Judicaria, in blazing daylight, are rubied over 
with the hovering butterflies of C. ewropaeum, while some of the finest 
clumps in these islands are growing in full sun in a gravel path where it 
is impossible to make out the shapes of the individual flowers, so dense 
is the congregation of rose-pink. All cyclamen can only be multiplied 
by seed, which germinates readily; collected corms re-establish surely, 
but they also re-establish as a rule rather slowly, so that those 
gardeners who put in a thing on Monday and expect to have their eye 
filled with glory by Wednesday are sometimes apt to be disappointed. 
C. africanum is a great-leaved plant also called C. macrophyllum. 
The big leaves appear in autumn, kidney-shaped, scalloped, and wavy 
at the edge. They are heralded by the yet earlier blossoms, with 
pointed petals of pink, marked by a mouth-ring of bright crimson. 
(Algiers, &c.) For a rather more sheltered place than the rest. 
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