DAPHNE. 
and get re-established. Patience, therefore, is called for, but will 
surely be repaid, especially as it is not possible by any other means to 
possess the wild Daphne. It is possible and pleasant and profitable 
indeed to graft its shoots in summer on to seedlings of D. Mezereum ; 
the loveliest little neat bushes result, round and wide and concise, and 
covered with flowers to the astonishment of all beholders. Is there not 
here in happy existence the specimen of the world, a grafted bush 
that has never failed to blossom exactly in time for the first 
summer show of the R.H8., with such uncanny regularity, whatever 
the alterations of date, that I suspect the plant of thoroughly realising 
its fame, and enjoying the popular applause that has greeted its un- 
failing appearance for the last twelve years. No sacrifice is too great 
for it; the flowers open the day before the show, and the nervous 
tension is such that they all drop off the day after it is over; it has 
refused the most tempting offers to go to America, and in its passion 
for publicity does not even shrink from the peril of the assassin’s 
knife, which one year surreptitiously tried to cut it in two. But 
this is a glory special and apart; it often happens that grafted 
pieces in the cpen miff suddenly away, nor do they ever have quite 
the charm, as erect trunked bushes, that is so entrancing in the 
typical tight flat mass of the wild plant, beset with living jewels of 
blossom so absurdly disproportionate to the packed minuteness of 
twig and leaf—a compactness which wholly vanishes in the grafted 
specimen. Let, then, your carefully collected tufts of the wild Daphne 
be carefully re-established for a year or two in small pots and in 
fullest sun ; then let just such another situation in full sun be chosen 
(among rocks to give the fullest character)—and there let the clump be 
planted in a deep mixture of lime-rubble, leaf-mould, good loam, sand 
and peat, all mixed up with almost an equal part of limestone chips ; 
there the treasure will be happy and increase far more certainly and 
unfailingly than D. Cneorum, and, in a season or two more, have grown 
so strong as to make up its mind for that annual display of blossom 
in June It even seems to appreciate the a of those 
fertilising pilules called Plantoids. 
D. retusa is a valuable new introduction. It is a small and very 
slow-growing bush, of extreme stolidity and sturdiness, with stiff 
boughs, clad in foliage exactly like that of Polygala chamaebuxus, but 
much thicker, stiffer, and of a more sombre leaden greenish-black. 
The flowers come at the ends of the shoots—delicious fragrant heads 
of large pink and lilac stars, rather like those of Daphne indica, pro- 
duced in the later summer. It is quite hardy and happy in any peaty 
mixture, a solid and sombre little uncompromising dome of great 
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