DAPHNE. 
in a few large sweet flowers of clear lavender-purple, after which 
appear the leaves, only to fall again in autumn. Unfortunately this 
Daphne requires a rather warm and sheltered place, nor indeed does 
its gawky habit confer much grace on the garden. 
D. kamtchatica is another tall-growing species with white flowers. 
D. Mezereum has innumerable light, dark, white, and large-flowered 
and purple-leaved varieties—a most variable and variable-tempered 
species, thriving often in cottage gardens with no care at all, while 
often despising those of the rich and mighty, where it is civilly 
entreated and made much of. Fortunately there is no denying that 
the look of the shrub is leggy and stiff, and, while the crowded sweet 
flowers up the stems make a fine show, their colour is tainted with 
a heavy and poisonous tone that comes out also upon the heavy and 
acrid sweetness of the plant’s breath. It has often established itself 
in English woods, coming freely from seed, but in one savage fold of 
the lonely hills under Ingleborough it has dwelt apparently from the 
beginning of things, as an alpine plant in an alpine situation, such as 
it chooses on the mountains of the Continent. The most interesting 
of its forms might also be a species; this is called D. pseudo-mezereon, 
and differs from the type in nothing but flowers of clear orange-yellow. 
There is a very fine white, and also poor ones. 
D. Sophia is yet another indifferent species with white flowers in 
terminal heads, most closely allied to D. altaica. 
EVERGREEN DAPHNES 
D. acuminata, from Russian Armenia, is a small branchy bush, 
' with velvety little red leafy twigs, the leaves being hairless, longish, 
and narrow. The velvety flowers are borne in dense heads of some 
five or seven, and the fruit is a gleaming orange berry. 
D. arbuscula, Christ, is a Jurassic form of D. Lawreola. 
D. arbuscula of gardens, although in reality it is but a narrow- 
leaved and diminished Austrian form of D. Cneorum (and, though a 
pretty thing, indeed, hardly deserves the fuss that attends it or the 
prices demanded for it), falls between the two thrones of D. petraea 
and D. Cneorum, having something of beauty from both, and almost 
suggesting an enlarged version of D. petraea. 
D. Blagayana is a noble creeping species that rambles about among 
stones occasionally, but not commonly, in the limestones of the 
Eastern Alps—a typical scree-plant, sending its long woody shoots 
here and there, and emerging between the blocks in a tuft of oval 
leaves and a large well-furnished cluster of creamy and deliciously 
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