DAPHNE. 
Eastern limestones and far West into the Pyrenees. An eye should 
always be kept open for forms—there are better and worse. The form 
called in gardens major is incomparably superior to most wild types, 
though it makes a neat small bush, instead of letting a few frail stems 
lie about in the hillside and glow among the grasses with rare heads 
of waxy pink like sweet Bouvardias, as does the type, in such lovely 
form and circumstances, on the last high slopes of Monte Baldo. 
(And there is also a pure white variety which will certainly be called 
D. C. album unless betimes we avoid the insidious trap and insist on 
alba.) It is in sun indeed that the Daphne habitually makes its frailest 
growth, but its finest flower ; in light woodland waxing into more of a 
bush, but tending to produce heads of smaller trumpets ; it is also 
curiously local—will abound for miles and then abruptly cease, as 
it haunts all the Ampezzo valley, but will not stir a step to the left 
up that appalling hill to Misurina—reluctant perhaps to intrude on the 
territory of D. striata (which there begins on the other side of the 
river), or disdaining such inefficient rivalry. 
D. collina is a plant close to the true D. sericea that so often bears 
the name in gardens (for D. sericea is D. collina of Smith and D. nea- 
politana of Loddiges), but the genuine D. collina has fatter downier 
stems than D. sericea, with longer, larger, hairier leaves, and a special 
profusion of flowers: it forms the same neat pudding-bowl bush, all 
covered with sweet heads of lilac-pink in summer. It grows readily 
in any fair place, and is also D. Fioniana of catalogues, besides having 
a yet downier variety called D. c. Vahlia. 
D.x Dauphini or D. hybrida is a perpetual-blooming and tall- 
growing shrub of glossy foliage with frequent heads of purple-lilac ; 
it is born of D. indica and is no less valuable. 
D. glomerata makes a dwarf neat bush, almost wholly glabrous, and 
about a foot high at the most, its branches radiating out neatly to 
form a mound, with rosettes of leathery leaves at the tips, and flowers 
pale pink outside and whitish within, that not only emerge in heads 
from their tips but sometimes also from the axils of the upper leaves. 
(Alps of Lazic Pontus, Caucasus, &c.) 
D. Gnidium, pontica, Laureola, Philippi are dowdy greeny-flowered 
shrubs of which no note need here be taken. 
D. indica, odora, japonica, Mazelii are all forms or sub-species of 
the indoor Daphne, which, in point of fact, is perfectly hardy out of 
doors in sheltered positions, though too large in the development of its 
great glossy bushes for the rock-garden, and shy of producing its 
fragrant heads unless well-ripened by a hot summer in the previous 
year. 
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