DAPHNE. 
sweet-scented flowers in the earliest morning of the year, and on into 
the spring. In cultivation here it merely requires a sunny warm 
corner (it does well in shade though, too), a rough soil of stones and 
peat and loam and sand ; and then to be treated like some independent- 
minded person in the palmy days of Hebrew priesthood, and. stoned 
with stones until he—does not die—but lives the more gloriously, 
and makes of them a Bethel from which at every point peer forth his 
tufts of leaves and fragrant heads. Each passer-by, to be popular 
in the garden, should cast a limestone boulder (or any other sort of 
boulder) upon the Daphne, until its pile becomes a sort of Absalom’s 
grave, perpetually getting higher and wider, and the Daphne there- 
with, until in the end you have a cairn of stones as at Glasnevin, 
half a dozen yards across, filled everywhere with the flower-heads of 
Daphne Blagayana. 
D. Cneorum stands, of course, next to the unapproachable D. 
petraea in delicate loveliness, and stands even above that rare wonder- 
ful jewel in garden value and show. Not that even this is a plant 
of easy temper. Daphnes are born democrats, and D. Cneorum shows 
neither fear nor favour. You may court it in vain, as you may court 
a cat, with cossetings and comforts uncounted—but with no result to 
show but the sickliness of a dying plant; yet in some neighbour’s 
garden, where it was ignorantly shovelled into hard common earth 
to act as an edging like Arabis, it will have run far and wide, with 
masses of neat well-furnished shoots each ending in those ample heads 
of waxy, brilliant, rosy trumpets that fill the air of June with fragrance. 
Or, having had the plant in glory for many seasons and filling wide 
beds, you may see it one day departing from you firmly, and never 
be able to establish it again. Some of the trouble arises, perhaps, 
from the soil in which it is so elaborately grown, for, though the turf 
in which D. Cneorum is found consists of peat, the rock is always lime- 
stone, and lime is what all these Daphnes crave, in spite of legends 
and ancient superstitions to the contrary. So, let their soil be a 
mixture of peat and loam and lime, and there should be no trouble 
with any of them ; they will even thrive magnificently in a mixture. 
of half mortar-rubble and half leaf-mould. It is specially interesting 
to see, and try to collect, D. Cneorum in the light woodland by Schluder- 
bach, for there it has woodland compost of some 3 or 4 inches depth, 
but after that the immense yellow rat-tail of the root goes plunging 
for a foot or so into the subsoil, which is absolutely nothing but pure 
limestone silt, undefiled with soil or apparent nourishment of any 
shape or kind. The species is found in the Jura, and then not again 
until you reach the Southern ranges, where it abounds far into the 
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